Ask YC: Photo Centralization Service | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Photo Centralization Service

3 pointswaynep4 comments

Recently, I've been receiving a lot of links to photo galleries where I was at an event and people have taken photos. My friends aren't very tech savvy so photo gallery usage is fragmented amongst them (picasa, facebook, fotki, kodakgallery, etc...).

I want to save these galleries in a centralized place online. I want to put in a url of a gallery I want to keep. Not just simply a bookmark, but the service should rip the photos and store it. As it stands right now, I'll probably never revisit the photo gallery or I'll have to come up with a way to rip it myself.

Most photosharing sites are about sharing not consuming or 'collecting'. I think this would be a great idea for a service, something akin to friendfeed but photos based. Is there such a service already? If not I think it would make a great company simply from solving a problem standpoint not necessarily a business plan one.

Thoughts or suggestions on such a service?

I'm not sure there is a good one. Generally, other people's photographs are their property, so scraping them would raise a whole bunch of problems if you have another person's photograph that they don't want you to have. Sounds silly, since you'd be in the photographs, but the site would get a lot of takedown requests. Not that YouTube doesn't, but you get the idea. I'm sure someone's done it though, I just don't know who.

You could potentially get around the copyright policy by putting a disclaimer that the user most 'own' or have permission to grab the images. It's no different than someone downloading a copyrighted picture and uploading them to another service.

The other big issue I can foresee is that most of the sharing websites don't have api's for you to programatically get at photos. They in fact do their best to prevent you from ripping photos. You would have to play a pretty nasty cat and mouse game there.

thanks for joining waynep, maybe i can help you out.

email paul - at - deluux.com

Most pictures I've seen hosted on SmugMug and Flickr are either rights reserved or non-commercial CC. "Consolidating" them into another site will eventually anger the wrong type of people.

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