Show HN: Pasteboard - HTML5 Web App for Quick & Easy Image Sharing (Open Source)
pasteboard.co
pasteboard.co
Bug report: I've copy-pasted an image file from my desktop and that's what a got: http://pasteboard.co/1345297649815178.png (that's an OSX default thumbnail image, not my image file). Chrome 20 @ OSX 10.6.8
This might be a bit confusing, I'm going to have to figure out how to make this more clear to the user.
First off, you might want to add something that indicates what kind of images are "valid". For example, I would love a site like yours where I could post my RAW CR2 files. While those are rarely good exactly like they are, they can be useful to show someone as an example of unretouched work, or as a guide to where I'm starting for someone to indicate "yes, but I really wanted you to get an angle looking from the south".
Second, I would love to have your service or some other one where I can pay a semi-ridiculous fee, and know the same image will still be available in 10 years. Right now I have about 1TB of images, and I wonder if anyone would bother to even look through them before just deleting the directory if I weren't around. It would be nice to know they are still somewhere. My current "workaround" is to post images to one of my blogs that I know Archive.Org backs up.
The purpose of this app is to provide a quick way for people to share their images, so the use case you describe does not really align with the goals that I have. I'm sure there are services that are better suited for what you want to do.
The second use case, I'm unaware of anything that legally provides that guarantee (i.e. with an SLA), but if you trust that Amazon will be around for 10 years, you could just sign up for an AWS account and put the images on S3 yourself. I'd put more stock (literally and figuratively) in Amazon than Archive.org for data reliability.
When I'm on a website and right-click -> copy Image, its says nothing is in my clipboard, I first have to paste it in Paint and copy it again for it to work on the site, is it a bug or am I misunderstanding how the clipboard works (I'm under Win7)?
When you generate the URL, it would be great if it was clickable or at least a button to go to the image. I understand the goal is for the user to have a URL to share so copying may be more important that clicking.
Do you plan to add the ability to delete a picture? I don't see a button anywhere to do so, and no info on how long you keep the data. Will you apply a policy like pastebin for text?
Anyway it's really an easy way to share a picture with someone, hope you'll add features!
About the copying images from a website: See my answer to arkitaip.
I'm considering adding a clickable link as well under the generated URL, that might actually be useful.
If I were to implement the ability to delete a picture, I would have to add some kind of user authentication which I'm not planning on doing at this moment. It might be possible to put some kind of secret client ID in the users localStorage to allow them to delete their own images, but I would have to make sure it can't be exploited so that other people can delete your images. Feel free to leave suggestions on how you could do this without requiring user accounts.
I would like to be able to store the images forever, but if the costs of doing so becomes to much for me to handle, I'm going to have to reconsider that.
I'm definitely planning on adding more features to the app, but one of the strong points of it is that it's very clean and simple at what it tries to do, so it's important that I don't try to add too much to it.
A clickable link or maybe a button with an image representing "Go to" action!
Storing images forever seems really hard and costly wouldn't it? Especially if you don't limit the original image size or resize it on your server.
For deletion of the image a solution could be to do like doodle.com. You provide one "administration link" where the uploading user can resize/crop/change the image, and a "publishing link" that he can provide to over people to see ?
A quick share through twitter/FB/G+ etc of the image uploaded could be nice too and help spread the word!
Giving an additional administration link is a possibility, but I'll have to put some more thought into what the best way to handle image deletion / editing would be.
Adding sharing options is on my to-do list!
This is an interesting case because I've always wondered how users interact with drag and drop ui in the browsers. Are users accustomed to the concept or does it confuse them because traditionally browsers haven't supported drag and drop? I bet there a risk for a conflict in the user's mental models!
I wonder how drag and drop would compare to the traditional approach to upload images:
1. click the Browse Image button
2. Locate images
3. Select Images
4. OK image selection
Like I said, would love to see some stats on browser drag and drop.
EDIT: Using Chrome, I tried to drag and drop an image on a web site to Pasteboard and it didn't work. Kinda obvious since it's a clipboard object but it would be really cool if it worked (not sure why you would like to host an image that's already on the web but it's the idea that counts, I reckon).
This action has been working for quite some time on Google Images [1] (drag and drop an image from a different tab to the search bar) so it's probably a design oversight.
Regardless, I personally find drag and drop between different windows I haven't prepared in advance a real bother. I'd rather have the OS filepicker pop-up on click, navigate to my images, switch to icon previews and select the image there.
About being able to drag images from another website, I decided to wait with implementing that feature since the main point of the app is to upload images that aren't already hosted somewhere else. The only use case it would have is if you'd like to crop the image before sharing it with others. I might add some analytics to track that too, to see how many there are that actually are trying to do that.
Anyways, I bookmarked it and will be using it.
The extra step is also there to let you crop the image, if you wish.
In Firefox a contenteditable div is used to catch pasted content, when images are pasted an img tag with base64 encoded image data is inserted, which is easy to just grab and display. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in Safari.
Because Safari seems to support all the needed APIs, it's hard to detect and inform the user that copy and paste doesn't work. I'd rather not do any browser sniffing.
One thing that I'm missing here are the Terms Of Service. Uploading stuff on other people's servers is always a legally problematic business. It should be made clear that the uploader retains all rights on the images.
Really good work by the way :)
If you can enable batch upload that'll be fantastic.
Kudos to keeping the app really simple and beautiful. +1
I haven't looked into how that works, so don't ask me about that :)
It would be brilliant if you could now extend the simple interface to some additional features like cropping, rotating, maybe even some photo filters. I'd definitely use it.
And that UI is amazing. I might have to take a peak at your source to learn a thing or two.
I, however, did not spend much time on the UI. :)