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Comment by haser_au | Hacker News Reader

Great story. I still think the sharing of photos with collocated friends needs solving, or have I missed a Google photos feature release?

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This isn't a technically hard problem to solve, but it seems people have been chasing it for years without any strong uptake. I suspect this is something that will have to be 'built-in' to the OS, and ideally some cross-platform protocol compatibility, before it ever becomes a 'standard' (assuming it does).

I worked with a startup for a while on a couple variations of this problem, and it's very much a classic chicken and egg problem. The angle that I was a bit more intrigued with taking was not about 'friends', and more just about the geo part. In other words, having your pics be available publicly by geo info. This conflicted a lot with the use cases of "share party pics with family/friends", but it seems there's dozens of ways to do that (facebook has a whole separate dedicated app that, to this day, few people I know knows about, but they all use facebook).

When I get done with an outing, Photos prompts me to share pictures of it with other people who were there and are pictured. So maybe it is being solved?

would be far more useful to share with anyone else who was there, regardless of if they're pictured (and, I have to presume, the app can determine via facial recognition who they are and if they're in your contact list).

all your pics would go to others, and all the pics from others would go to you. (think concerts/events)

Useful, maybe, but risky from a privacy perspective.

I'm not an apple user, but isn't this essentially solved by airdrop? Or do people not actually use that?

I use it regularly.

Me too.

Airdrop is pretty much useless because its proprietary and only works on apple devices. A useful tool for photo sharing has to work for almost everyone.

Something is not "useless" because it is only "useful" to a portion of the population. Floppy disks were a useful tool for file sharing in the 1990s, but not amongst people who didn't own computers.

I think you're missing an 'I' or 'for me' in there somewhere. Lots of people find airdrop useful.

Let's try to rescue this statement. Airdrop is useful in general, but there are still large pockets of people for whom it's useless. Large, like don't know, Europe.

Airdrop is the kind of tool that follows Metcalfe's law (with "network" being "people who can Airdrop to each other"). In places where Android is the dominant market player, you'll have little luck trying to use Airdrop to exchange data with other people. This is not dissing Airdrop, just calling out that there's a huge market segment that still has this problem.

Why can't Europeans use Airdrop?

The default smartphone over here is an Android phone, not an iPhone.

That's the case pretty much everywhere, including in the US. I thought that the post implied some structural reason why Airdrop can't be used in Europe by people with iPhones.

there's plenty of scenarios where the apple users in a room comprise "almost everyone".

Airdrop is incredibly unreliable. In my experience, you have a 50% chance that the other device will appear. If it works today, there's no guarantee it'll work tomorrow. And that's with all devices on the same Wifi network, in the same room. I don't know why it works so poorly.