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Comment by renchap | Hacker News Reader

SmugMug is really bringing back sanity into Flickr, good to see this after the Yahoo fiasco.

I created Talegraph [1] as a platform to tell stories with your pictures, and it has been hard for us to explain to users why paying for the product is the only way to ensure your pictures will stay online and private. Paying for what you use & privacy is not something normal people are used to, but this is the only sustainable way imo.

[1] https://www.talegraph.com

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This looks like just the product I need to move away from putting my travel snaps on Facebook. Instagram isn't suited for albums and Flickr is hard to build a narrative with. Looking forward to trying it out after my next trip!

Thanks, this is exactly why we started working on Talegraph :)

This does look really nice!

Have you looked into automatically generating "travel tracks" for each chapter in a Tale from OwnTracks data?[1] An integration like that would definitely make Premium more appealing, and be more interesting than a map with a "pin" on it.

Do you have any plans to add an export ("take out") option that will allow you to download the images, text, captions, etc. as JSON? I worry about investing the time to create some beautiful "tales" but not having a good way to archive them in case you are acquired / shutdown / decide to call it quits.

[1] https://owntracks.org/booklet/guide/clients/

Thanks! I plan to add tracks to the maps feature. I only added maps recently and this is the next logical step. I did not know about OwnTracks but I definitely plan to allow importing external GPS data, in addition to EXIF GPS data. For the data export, this is definitely planned. I can do it manually right know if you ask for it, but creating a process to do it automatically is not the top priority. But we will not shutdown or be acquired before this is in place. I got screwed too many time by other SaaS who just disappeared so I dont want to repeat this with my users.

Good luck with this! Way back 10 years ago I started a private ning group for close old friends who were still very conservative online. Un & pw protected closed community. They are mostly on FB now and just don't understand about your digital rights online.

I think and hope people may start waking up a bit with the FB and Yahoo fiascos...

This looks interesting. Does it support import from the SmugMug API or from other sources?

I would love to do it, but unfortunately most APIs forbid imports and only allow you to store pictures for caching purposes (Flickr [1], Google Photos [2]) and have restrictions / heavy fees for commercial usage.

Dropbox import is planned, I havent looked at SmugMug API's terms yet but will add it to the todolist.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/help/terms/api [2] https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/acceptab...

Interesting. This is a grave argument against using those services. Thanks.

Is that if the service does it, or if the users do it?

When I moved my photos from Flickr to SmugMug a few years back they (SmugMug) had a browser plugin that moved everything over. I thought it was odd, but figured it was to get around some kind of rule like that.

Yes this could work, and even if the API terms do not allow it (ie Google Photos API do not allow you to download the pictures for storage) you can use the Data Export feature that most websites have and use this export to upload back your data elsewhere.

Why shouldn't I host it myself for €5/month?

Because for 5 / month you won’t get the software?

I asked because it doesn't look like much from the examples. Picture gallery with some text. Maybe I'm missing something special here.

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