Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You | Hacker News Reader

Snapjoy (YC S11) Will Organize Your Photos For You

techcrunch.com

185 pointsjpren60 comments

My feature requests (as they have been for every service I've tried from Flickr, to 500px, to Smugmug):

1) Let me upload my RAWs. Better if you can display them as is, but at least do what Adobe does and show the embedded JPEG if not.

2) Allow me to edit online with HTML5 compatible tools (Adobe's online service will let you edit, but uses Flash for some odd reason). With that I can edit from the road using my iPad.

3) If you want to make money, help me make money too... i.e. better to take a share of sales (win-win) then charge me and I have to hope I make enough to justify paying you. Even better if you can help me market.

4) Killer option even if you fail on the previous three - identify the things I can't. Wildflowers are number one on this list, but animals can be an issue sometimes as well. It wouldn't hurt if you can take my location from the photo, figure out which way I'm facing (time of day and angle of sun), and identify that peak in the distance as well (though supposedly the military is working on that one).

5) One I am surprised I don't see more of on the photo sites - run some juried contests. Great way to spark interest in your site, as well as let folks know they can find the up and coming photographers with some help (sort of like 500px's "editor's choice", but with benefits.

6) One more "killer" feature - tell me what I did wrong. If I ask you to look (programmatically) at my photo, take a look at the curves and the EXIF data, and tell me what I should have done to get a better picture.

7) Final request - give me a way to take what you have organized, and pull it back as those same albums onto my PC. That reduces guess work of what I have or haven't backed up, and lets me not worry as much about whether you will still be around in two years.

I'm just speculating here, but perhaps their primary target audience are casual users, not serious photographers. It seems like most of your feature requests are geared towards power users.

#6 sounds like a really great idea. Does a version it exist anywhere in any form? Plugins for Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture/whatever? Standalone desktop software? Anything?

For professionals there's http://www.imatest.com/home

Thanks. It definitely seems like where a super-super-simplistic version for amateurs would be of great value, especially if it can work across multiple images, spotting mistakes you tend to make regularly.

RAW files are not for public consumption and should never be shown without processing. They lack contrast and sharpness at a minimum.

Sure, upload the RAW files as a backup (Smugmug provide a "Vault" service for this reason) but if you're not going to process your RAW files then you'd be better off shooting in JPEG and configuring the in-camera processing correctly.

Both Kicksend and Snapjoy insist on Real Names, very irritating. (Is it a YC trend?) Will you purge accounts that don't use them G+ style? Will I upload a bunch of files, have them no where else (your average person) and then find out they've disappeared one day because of an inane real name policy with no recourse? How about if I don't have a last name, and have to make one up to fill out your form? You'll get real names with payed accounts, but it's otherwise unwelcome.

True Names, broken though the model is, are the fad of the hour because Google is hell-bent on them. And since it is the fondest wish of many funded startups to be bought by Google, nobody is going to get fired for doing exactly what Google is doing at any given moment.

I've been looking for something like this but as a desktop photo backup app with cloud option. With two young kids I have tons of pictures and videos to wade through and its just not cost effective to store it all on the cloud when 2TB drives cost $100. But it is _such_ a pain for my wife and I when we consolidate pics from our various devices and then do a backup to multiple USB drives. And its just going to get worse over time.

What I would love is an app that would analyze my library, eliminate exact dups, and backup automatically to each drive when I plug them in. Kind of like iPhone sync but from devices->comp->external storage. Super Bonus Points if it can auto-level pics.

But the biggest time sink is winnowing down the raw photos to a best-of list suitable to upload to an online photo sharing site. Usually we take 4 or 5 pics that are all about the same and then have to go through each 'group' and pick the best. Having so many usually means we just skip it and store them all for later. But that's really just delaying the pain, someday when we want to show them off its really gonna hurt. Its generally more important to me to get an OK pic that conveys the idea of the 'memory' rather than spending the extra time to pick the absolutely best shot.

Fancy algo's to the rescue?

Actually, even very dumb algorithms totally destroy the problem you describe in your third paragraph.

Even if all you do is organize by date and show the first few photos for each day ("featured" photos), that's enough to vary the stream of photos people browse through.

I speak from experience, as someone who runs a photo-sharing site that organizes by date. I also make it easy to switch between featured/non-featured for any photo, but doing such switching is not a prerequisite. You already have a nicely varied collection just by uploading.

From what I've seen of Snapjoy so far, their format also guarantees variety. I haven't seen the fancy algorithms in action yet, but I imagine there are techniques one could use to make the initial set of "featured" photos more likely to be varied.

I like the idea, definitely need a Windows client though. I think you should also release pricing pretty soon, I don't want to go through the effort of uploading photos if its going to be very expensive all of a sudden. I'd also like to point out that 'a few gigs' is not very many photos these days. I'm not photographer but I had 3-4 gigs of photos after my recent 3 week trip to the USA on just a fairly basic digital camera.

Your price point is going to be a tricky one to pick. Dropbox charges around $10 for 50gb, which if I was only using it for photo backups, would be too much, and I'd not do it.

Feature request: allow me to pull all of my photos from my current Flickr account via their API.

We have a lot of great ideas brewing around pulling your photos from other services. Stay tuned!

The feature to avoid duplicates will be a huge help when importing from those other services.

It will be tough to detect duplicates from Facebook, where they recompress and strip metadata.

Yeah upvote that! Pulling all photos from a Flickr account would be a great (almost necessary) feature!

Glad that the TC article touches on it, but with the track record of YC company acquisitions and killing products (yes yes, I realize dropbox is an exception), it really feels like a leap of faith to trust a YC associated backup service.

I can deal with having to export my files in case of acquisition, but it will keep me from suggesting this service (which sounds awesome, by the way) to non-technical friends and family.

Have there been companies that were acquired and just shut down/deleted everything? The ones I've seen just said "we're ceasing operations in 90 days, please back your data up".

That is a solution for these companies, but still leads to distrust. You use a backup service so you can leave your files on the site and not worry about it. This is the problem yc companies now face.

This is the problem yc companies now face.

It sounds like you're describing a problem all startups face.

My concern isn't their vanishing overnight.

My concern is recommending the service to my 70 year old father and getting a confused phone call from him about why his bookmarks are broken and instead lead to an acquisition notice and then having to walk him through the export process.

In other words, the value to me in recommending these services to my friends and family is 1) that they'll use them and see some benefit and 2) that I won't have to support it.

And, at the risk of getting all patio11, you know who spends a lot of time organizing photos? Older folks and housewives; NOT Silicon Valley wunderkinds who are trying out the latest and greatest YC company which got a mention on TechCrunch. The problem this team will face is that you have technically literate people like me standing between them and the non-technical friends and family who will shell out $20/mo until the end of time to organize and share photos of their grandkids.

If this is just a tech demo before a FB acquisition, disregard the whole thing though. :)

That's one of the things I've loved about Smugmug over the past 5-6yrs: they're profitable, they're independent and they don't have any intention of selling out. They're a brand I trust and believe in, which is why I give them my money.

We hear ya. Building trust takes time. If it means anything though, we built Snapjoy to scratch our own itch, not to flip.

So, in the inverse, if it were not a YC-associated company, you would trust that company more or less? Regardless of your opinion of Flickr, I did not fear the future of my photos when Yahoo! acquired them. Last I checked, they were still there.

That aside, I do see your point, but to say that you will not recommend a really nice service to your friends and family on the sole basis that they are a YC company seems odd.

I saw this at work, signed up, and uploaded a few pics. I wanted to check it out later when I had more time. By the time I got home, I had forgotten the name of the service. I checked my email to see some kind of welcome message, but I didn't get one.

While I appreciate your efforts not to spam, a simple email might help your users find you, learn know how to use your service, etc.

Is there anything else on the market that is similar to this? I'm just curious for comparisons.

I'm definitely hesitant to use this because of lack of pricing, and I also have no idea what's "smart" about this besides it being organized by date. I don't want to upload 1,000 photos and see it in action. Show me examples on the site.

There's no easy way of sharing photos either which is a deal breaker for now.

My site http://ourdoings.com/ also organizes by date, and there are samples on the front page you can click through to see different people's timelines.

However, I think Snapjoy's right to tell people to upload their own photos to see it in action. To me, 2005/December means Puerto Rico. For it to mean that to you I have to tag/caption/etc. Upload 1,000 of your own photos and you'll see how easy it is to have a navigable, varied, enjoyable collection. (That sentence applies to any site that organizes by date and uses any algorithm to mitigate the too-many-redundant-photos problem).

This looks terrific, I've begun the task of uploading photos. Funny question to be asking on my first day I guess, but has anyone figured out how to delete photos once they're already up?

aha, figured it out. Hovering over the picture in certain bulk modes shows a check mark, clicking this checkmark brings up a bulk editing view where you can send to trash. I don't believe it's possible to delete single photos

Grats guys, I love Snapjoy's ease of use.. and the desktop uploader app is awesome.

This looks amazing!

Does it let me use one account across several computers so that all photos end up in the same cloud account?

Absolutely. We're going to be pulling your photos from web services and other devices soon :)

wow. I think you've just solved my "photo problem".

What about if I have more photos than hard drive space?

That's cool. We can provide you virtually unlimited storage for your authoritative photo collection on our servers.

We can provide you virtually unlimited storage for your authoritative photo collection on our servers.

That is what I've been looking for, along with a way to have multiple computers "own" the photos and use them off of the local hard drive as needed (such as to order prints, etc.)

For public photos (if you ever add them), it'd be great if there was a clean way for the poster to assert copyright; and, if they do, a way for 3rd parties to contact them for image permissions.

I am not sure about the backup your photo pitch. I think the way they are showing pictures in a horizontal + vertical timeline is very very nice. If I were a photo person, I would like to have this app talk to Instagram, Picplz, FB, etc... grab all my pics and show them in such timeline.

We agree ;)

This is so good. Anybody else feel its way better than Path?

The introduction on the homepage is a bit vague though. Maybe mention that it organizes by date or some more clue. I had no idea what this service does unless I visited the live demo.

How do I view all my pictures into one single stream? I like them group for information, and I also want to see them as iPhoto does it. contact me for more feedback john {} gabaix.us

I uploaded couple of pictures and it said that they are being processed. When I clicked on the "Dashboard" button to see the progress, it took me to the welcome page again.

Thanks for pointing that out. We probably haven't fully processed a single image from your queue yet, so sorry about the confusing circle it's throwing you in during that case... will fix on our end

I can not upload my pics that have extension JPG instead of jpg.

jpg == JPG?

Ah I believe that issue occurred before when you're on Linux only. It should be fixed now.

Could iPhoto and iCloud be something of a threat here?

I was just thinking the same thing.

And by "organize" they mean "sort by date".

What's the real breakthrough here?

There's a lot more than that meets the eye happening beneath the surface. When you have a thousand photos up there, you'll get a better feel of our algorithmic clustering.

Well, can you just tell us what the features are?

Why can't you try it instead? It's free...

There's at least some work by the algo to recognise different moments of the same day, I still need to upload more pictures to try to understand it correctly.

- It takes longer to try than to read

- I wouldn't want to sign up or upload any of my pictures before I know that I am going to actually use the site

I understand but that's like saying you won't be using Google because they didn't explain the algo. Or you won't try the iPhone because they don't explain the algo that makes it scroll so gently. And so on.

It's free, you can try it if you really want. You can even use someone else's pictures. Asking for the algo seems too much.

You want me to upload a thousand photos to see how it works? :)

As someone who runs another photo sharing site that organizes for you by date, I can say yes.

First, it's important to know that uploading a thousand photos is way easier on such a site, since you do no organizing work. Try uploading a thousand photos to Flickr without culling, organizing into albums, tagging and captioning, and see what your result looks like. It doesn't have to be like that.

Second, they have to be your photos for you to appreciate chronological organization. When I look at my own, I can say, "Wow, I just click 2005, then December and I see my Puerto Rico pictures. And I didn't have to organize them myself." You don't get the same effect looking at someone else's.

You need that many to understand the basics of the algo behind it? If that's how you debug your code than you might need to learn some better ways to do it...

Sorting by date is a breakthrough for normal people. I've been developing and advocating it for years. The big photo sharing sites make you sort manually into albums because that's what professionals and photography enthusiasts want. Photo sharing for the rest of us is just getting started.

I'm eager to see more about the algorithmic clustering, but the site's overloaded now.

I manually sort my photos by Date Pictures Taken into their own folders. I don't see a big deal about this as a separate service.

It doesn't bother you that photo-sharing web sites don't use the same simple organization scheme you use locally, but require you to create albums, etc.?

Not everyone know how to name their photographs. The proper photograph naming scheme is simply the biggest missed opportunity since the dawn of digital cameras. Using the naming scheme of Dates Pictures Taken, along with a word or two of the event, people can save themselves from aggravation in managing their thousands of digital photos.

Generally, photos are taken of an event and on a particular day. You may have multiple events in the same day, so you can further nest by time as well. But that's as far as an average user go.

It should be user's own responsibility to manage their naming schemes and sorting. You can then upload folders to any web service (or don't even bother if you use Sugar Sync or Dropbox etc).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com