Comment by decode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by decode | Hacker News Reader

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> I went to Costa Rica with three other friends. At the end of the trip each of us had about 1GB of photos. [...] The entire process was cumbersome and took about an hour.

This means that each person "uploaded" 1GB of data and "downloaded" 3GB of data. In total, 16 GB of data was transferred. Doing this manually via USB drive is about an order of magnitude faster than over your average broadband Internet connection. It's not clear to me that Divvyshot has solved the problem here.

> I never ended up getting that group photo - even though low resolution copies of it tantalize me on Facebook.

I was surprised to realize several years ago that one of Facebook's greatest contributions to my life was that it completely solved the photo sharing problem and had done it so well that I didn't even notice. Now I get everyone's photos from every event, I get notified when they're uploaded, and it seems like everyone I know can use it without problems. Sure, I wish it supported higher resolutions, but the medium-res images are good enough for 95% of people. If they would just allow slightly higher resolutions, then it would be perfect for almost all of my needs.

> Sure, I wish it supported higher resolutions, but the medium-res images are good enough for 95% of people.

Where did you get 95%? I've heard this before yet I don't know of anyone (besides us) who's actually taken the time to ask users if med-res is good enough.

When founding Divvyshot I used Amazon mechanical turk to conduct a quick market survey (with hundreds of respondents). A few highlights:

77% of respondents knew what hi-resolution photos were and preferred them.

43% had manually increased the resolution setting on their camera.

77% had been promised photos from a social event within the last few months and had never received them.

Being able to just hand out an URL instead of burning several CDs or repeatedly handing out and collecting some USB drive if you want to exchange high resolution photos sounds like an advantage to me.

Email is still no alternative. Gmail, for example, has a 25 MB limit. Good for maybe five photos. Something like dropbox might be. (But you cannot share there if your friends don’t have accounts.) – edit: Ah, just noticed that’s seemingly also the case with divvyshot.

Well, that’s a problem you should work on – I cannot and will not force my friends to sign up for anything when I just want to share photos. That sort of defeats the whole purpose. There already is a unholy proliferation of all kinds of services you need a password for. That’s nice if all you want is a nice collection of great tools (you can pick and chose and end up only with a handful) but not so nice if you have to force your friends to sign up when you want to use the thing for one of its main use cases.

I bet you could make it possible to download and maybe even contribute (adding photos by sending them via Email, maybe?) without needing to sign up. Your use cases should work without me having to force people to sign up and hate me and your service as a consequence.

I know your whole signup process is dead simple (make it even simpler be not having people type their password twice) and you don’t even need to use your real Email address and you don’t even send out a welcome Email (all great things, really, I wish everyone were like you) but I know quite a few people (and not just nerds) who are allergic to any kind of signup form.

I have to correct myself once again. You can actually upload photos without signing up, just (as I suggested :) by sending them by Email. Cool! Just tested it, works great. That feature is a bit hidden, though, but that makes for a nice experience when you discover it :)

I still think you cannot download full resolution photos without signing up. Did I miss anything?

> Where did you get 95%?

Of course, I just made it up based on anecdotal experience with friends and family. For all I know, my friends and family could just be weird. However, I wonder if you encountered significant selection bias by polling people that are technical enough to participate in Mechanical Turk. Have you done anything other than an MT survey? I bet Flickr has some really good data on how many images get viewed at the default medium resolution and what percentage of people click through to the high resolution versions. Even then, Flickr may skew towards artistic images, rather than just people sharing photos of social events.

Doing this manually via USB drive is about an order of magnitude faster than over your average broadband Internet connection.

Some downsides to using flash drives over DivvyShot: a) Not everyone has one; b) Not everyone knows how to use one; c) Limited space; d) Inconvenient--everyone has to be together and wait around while the other guys transfer their files over. With Divvyshot, you can upload/download photos whenever you want.

one of Facebook's greatest contributions to my life was that it completely solved the photo sharing problem

Facebook is definitely a convenient way to share photos, if you and all your friends have profiles and set them up properly. For people who just want to share photos and not deal with all of Facebook's features, DivvyShot is quite compelling.

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