Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

19 pointsadilsaleem45 comments

I was having a discussion with my friends on photo sharing and a lot of them didnt seem to like the existing solutions. There are many photo sharing services and every social networks seems to offer it as well. But there are always people who are looking for a better solution.

Do you think there is room for a new picture sharing site?

View on HN

Yeah, it's tough when facebook is becoming the default for everyone uploading their pictures. If facebook expands that aspect of their business it might hard between them and flickr already being huge.

I don't understand the downmods on this comment; theklub makes a perfectly valid point. I would agree that the market for the masses in this area is much too competitive (if you think you can trump Google in search, well, go for it), even with just two players (ignoring SmugMug and the tail).

I would agree that niche, if at all, is the way to go. Niche of the upper upper pros, who already pay for Flickr pro but find it limiting.

On HN Downmods are not always reasonable; you get downmod mostly because the witch-hunt folks don’t recognize your ID. If you look carefully you will see people getting Upmod for no apparent reason. I guess there’s some sort of club or circle whatever you want to call it. I stop worrying about karma long ago.

Instead of alleging a conspiracy, maybe you should just relax. Sometimes good comments get downmodded incorrectly, buried low on the page, and not noticed. Sometimes it fixes itself. Like now. Sometimes it doesn't.

It happens, from time to time. Welcome to the Internet, version 2.

Sam seems to think so and apparently YC agreed with him (well, maybe): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453303

That's the first thing I thought of too when I saw this post. Have you watched the screencast of the dropbox-like functionality? Pretty slick.

About half way through when he pulled down pictures from the site. In the back of my mind I was thinking "ok cool, but can you push your pictures to your friend?", and then it happened. Good stuff.

My buddy Allen Stern (of CenterNetworks) said something recently in a podcast that I liked and is relevant here. Paraphrasing, he said something like, "In New York City there are a thousand pizza places and new ones opening up all the time. Many of them are successful and some of the new ones will be, too."

Or, in other words, there is always room for new startups that do the same thing. Just do it better or differently -- have better crust, better toppings, faster delivery, free breadsticks, etc.

As you said, "there are always people who are looking for a better solution." You just need to make it.

It's very misleading to compare pizza places to web businesses.

Every new pizza shop adds tangible value to the system. It has a physical presence and sells a physical good that fulfills a basic need.

A web shop, without marketing, adds basically zero value to the system. It's not like you can "walk by" and discover that it provides something. And I don't think any pizza shop bootstrapped its business by offering pizza for free until it got a critical mass of popularity.

The message makes sense, but the example does not.

It might make sense--a pizza shop owner who couldn't afford to rent in a highly-trafficked area may have similar problems bringing customers to his storefront (stores don't usually pop up and have instant success).

Plus, a brick-and-mortar store owner has higher fixed costs.

It's not like you can "walk by" and discover that it provides something.

Sure you can, organic traffic.

I think you're reading too much into the analogy -- or misreading it.

The analogy isn't, "web business are just like pizza shops!" Rather, the sentiment that I think Allen was communicating is, "in _any_ business, there is always room for competitors and new ways of doing things."

I wish I could remember the link to the podcast so you could hear it in the exact context.

There is always room for new startups to do the same thing, but in consumer internet it typically requires a drastically different angle because network effects and switching costs kick in (whereas it does not for a single pizza parlor).

This is why Friendster was forced to focus on China and give up hope in US.

YouTube's competitors had a hard time moving in on mass-consumer video (they were forced to go white label or focus on businesses, monetization, or analytics) due to the push-pull effect of YouTube's entrenched publisher-viewer community (and their network effect of widgets scattered across the web).

Kijiji positioned dramatically different than Craigslist (100% ad supported and much better UI) and it was seeded with a different audience (all the inactive eBay users were spammed giving it overnight critical mass).

SmugMug does a terribly good job and its not clear what angle you would take in entering their market. They have scale (300K paying users) and killer customer support (which is critical for their target customer who typically lacks technical expertise) and can outprice folks looking to replicate their offering with a significant incremental improvement to their service.

What angles to entering the photo-sharing market do you folks see?

I think it really depends on if you're talking about a completely consumer/snapshot sharing service that is free. If so, I would say "no". Facebook and Flickr dominate and (to my knowledge) neither make money solely on their photo services. (Facebook's only revenue is ads and I doubt Flickr's Pro account covers the cost of the entire service).

If you're talking about a premium/freemium service that is targeted at pro-sumers, then maybe. SmugMug and others (myself included) have shown that it can be done profitably. It's just that with a paid service, you reduce your market considerably (no one wants to pay to upload their halloween party pictures).

But I think there are new markets to explore for paid services. Just depends on who you're trying to reach.

It seems hard to believe now, but when Google started, some people wondered "why another search engine?", since Yaho and Altavista had that market "locked up".

So yes, there is room for another photo sharing service.

...provided yours is better than your existing competitors.

There is always room for better solutions. Think about Google...there were other search engines around when Google was launched but where are they now. If you can deliver a better solution always go for it.

I'd like a service that in one way made photos second class entities, and in another way treated them as the be all and end all.

I want the hires, the digital negative, to be able to pair a digital negative and a jpg... so that's the first class stuff.

But I want the current attributes of a photo on Flickr to be first class... time and place matter. In fact, a photo is an attribute of a moment in time. And so it should figure out when multiple people upload based on a shared event that the uploads are happening at the same place, and it should then work out from the timestamps when it was, so if anyone adds a geotag all matching files are implicitly tagged unless overridden.

I want to search photos like tineye.com does... provide a photo as a search token. I want to find "similar" photos to the one I have... did someone link to a photo that belongs to a set, how do I get back to that set? How do I widen the search to find other photos from the event?

I want to be able to get the original or negative, regardless of the size, if it's a CC image.

I want to be able to background upload. If the images are local, then they're magically going to be published too.

I'd like an auto image stitcher for lo-fi gigapan-ish images... select the ones to be stitched and go for it.

Lots of things really. There's so much room still.

Yes, but you need to find a way to do picture sharing better. What would differentiate your startup from flickr or photobucket? A tie in to all the networking sites where you upload your photo once and they show up in all of your networks might be a big win, I don't know.

You can always find room in the market for a better mousetrap, provided you have a good idea of how the mousetrap needs to be improved.

What I'd like (and what I'd build if I had more spare time & mental capacity) is a photo-hosting service driven by a Flickr-like API, but designed to be an intelligent "asset store" for photos so large sites or communities can use this service as their photo storage & hosting back-end. The service itself wouldn't need much of a UI and users of sites/systems that depend on the service wouldn't necessarily know their photos are there.

I imagine this working something like S3 except that it knows about images, so it can process/resize them (and provide APIs to control such things) and also include a bundled CDN service (CloudFront). The pieces are all there but an API that made it really easy to put images in, process them and get them out again would save a lot of time.

(I manage a high traffic blog network and am spec'ing out some image-heavy niche web apps/sites. I'm eventually going to have to build something like this for internal use -- wish I could just buy in now).

of course there is. even the biggest photo sharing sites like Flickr have less than 1% of market share of internet users, plenty of space to go in.

Also you have to remember that its a standalone service, so users will get value from day 1. So just throw up a good looking user interface and first time users will sign up to try it out

There are probably a lot more of these sites out there than the "big ones". I estimate in the tens, but possible 100+. I'd spend a few days enumerating and categorizing the competition in terms of approach taken, features, etc. learning what their Google footprint is, whether they're mentioned in blogs, what Alexa says about them, etc. This would give you a better picture about what your chances of success are. Without actually doing this research, I'd say it's a crowded segment, so your chances of succeeding are probably relatively low. I'd wait for a better idea / differentiator.

Good luck!

Seems like niche specific sites like twitpic.com can do pretty well...

I think photo-sharing services need to verticalize and create niches.

I see a clear case for a photo-sharing service specifically designed to host high-resolution images (big size) images which are rapidly becoming the norm with higher resolution cameras rolling out.

What would it take:

1. Uploading will take more time. Should happen in the background. 2. Browsing can be made better - by showing reduced resolutions on the fly - zooming out on parts etc.

Just allowing bigger files would be a start. I have a Canon 5D M2, and I keep ending up trying to upload > 10 mb jpegs to flickr, which has a 10 meg limit.

Perhaps expensive though.

What do you think the user tolerance for paying to host large images would be? Obviously bandwidth and storage cost money, and if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow.

Page views and ads and referral arrangements to photo printers aren't going to automatically scale with photo sizes for a free site.

Probably low, since there's already at least one low priced service (zooomr) that has no individual filesize limit. Prices of hard disks have been dropping precipitously, so I think there's an expectation out there that the same cost for online services should happen (gmail's steadily increasing quota also reinforces that). I realize those expectations are probably unrealistic.

In terms of bandwidth, a flickr-like display that shows a smaller size by default mitigates that. It's the convenience of uploading a full-size file and getting it resized to multiple sizes (and the full size is there for those who want to see it).

> if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow

Not so fast. Bandwidth and storage needs scale roughly with resolution, but other costs scale more slowly or even not at all. Note that even storage (and to a lesser extend bandwidth) has a per-action cost that does not depend (much) on resolution. And, storage costs include meta data, which doesn't scale with resolution.

I've been working through a cost model for a (different kind of) image service and there are are surprises.

For a first approximation, work through how you might build such a site on Google App Engine and/or Amazon Web Services and build a parameterized cost model using their fee schedules for different things. Fiddle with the values for the parameters.

I realize that 4x increase in pixels doesn't mean 4x increase in the file size, but I was discussing in terms of filesize. Unless you have absolutely insanely higher metadata stored per image than we do, your metadata probably amounts to under 2.5% of the image data for hypothesized 2MB files, so maybe 2.05 goes to 10.05 which is basically still a 400% increase. Part of the metadata is on fast (DB) disk, so your costs don't scale absolutely linearly, but bulk cold disk is still scaling up 4x.

To a large extent, I have worked through it for our application (I run IT for a top 100 e-commerce site that does a very substantial amount of uploads in the holiday season; we choose to self-host several dozen TB and have an emergency overflow possibility out to S3 if we fill up our in-house storage).

I can't see how storage costs are meaningfully sub-linear, and bandwidth costs can be due to bulk pricing, but are still first-approximation linear with upload size. (You might argue that you can use 95/5 pricing to work around that by forcing users to schedule their uploads for an off-peak time, but then you could do that in the base case as well.)

I would love to hear more about your surprises in the model, either on HN or privately, as this represents a substantial portion of my budget, and if I'm missing something, I'm not too proud to change course. :)

[I can't find an e-mail address in your profile or the blog that it mentions.]

I was going with 4x file size and assumed that bandwidth for images is linear in file size, aka no bulk discounts.

One of my points is that IOs have a cost too, a cost that is largely independent of file size.

To first approximation, disk IO capacity is proportional to the number of disks. (Yes, some disks, especially the flash ones, support a lot more IOs/sec than others.) If you're IOs bound, you either have spare disk space or can probably increase the amount of disk space at a sublinear price. (1.5TB drives are <3x as expensive as 500GB.)

For some data transfers, AWS has a "per operation" charge in addition to a bandwidth charge. The latter is proportional to file size but the former is not.

My application has a lot of processing costs. Most of them are on metadata, not the images, so they don't grow with image size. I also do a lot of stuff with "thumbed" images - producing them is a function of file size but storing them and moving them around isn't.

My model is different from yours in at least two ways.

(1) I'm estimating some things.

(2) I'm using AWS and GAE prices. (I'm assuming the highest prices because if my app is getting enough use that I'm getting bulk discounts, I've got other problems.)

If I had a model that tracked my actual experience, I wouldn't listen to some bozo on a website....

FWIW, data in a db is significantly larger than the actual data.

OK Thanks. Couple comments:

Our bulk storage disk sees very little in the way of IOPS-requested. (An entire Gbps pipe couldn't fill the IO capacity of 4U of the 1TB SATA drives we use for bulk upload storage, and we have way more than that. ;) ) DB and hosts disks are another story entirely, and I have to admit that we don't really account for all those costs as "upload related" (by and large, they are not upload-driven) so we have some model inaccuracy there as well, but for every 2MB file we have on SATA, we probably have 20-40K in thumbnails on faster disk and well under 1K in fairly narrow, and not heavily indexed DB rows on 2 tables.

As for listening to a bozo on website...well, HN is by and large not bozo-filled, it was pretty clear you weren't one, had given some thought to this problem, and I'm more than ready to admit when I'm potentially able to learn from someone else something that might save me/my company money.

It does sound like your app has substantial sub-linear cost components, and I admit ours has some smaller ones as well but that we just don't model them tightly enough to see those components.

Thanks for the info, and I wish you the best in your endeavor(s).

How about a service that allows you to upload raw formats like .DNG, and do basic non destructive editing on them, nothing fancy just crop, heal, contrast, color, that sort of thing. to serve as both an online backup service, easy way to share images when you don't have time to really fiddle with them, or they're just not good enough to bother. as well as yes just sharing you're best.

How about an app that kind of automatically airbrushes pics that you upload to it so that you can then upload them to other sites?

Yes, there is a room. For example, I myself still didn't found an "ultimate" sharing site for myself. I use Google picasaweb, because I like the integration with the Picasa client, but I miss the social features. I can have those on flickr, but on the other site, the free option in flickr is rather limited and there is not a seamless integration with a good client.

The fact that a lot of your friends are not happy with the existing solutions should be an indicator that there is potential for a new photo sharing site. I think, "photo sharing" includes a lot of different, sometimes very specific use-cases implying different devices that could be explicitly supported. The answer is clearly: yes!

A lot of users want to share their photos and are blissfully unaware of FaceBook/Flickr.

You said it yourself:

>But there are always people who are looking for a better solution.

Don't dive straight in, work out what users want that flickr/etc doesn't offer - and do that.

blissfully unaware of fb? considering photo tagging (and then showing up in the news feed) is just about the killer app on fb - and its 150mil users growing at 10mil per month -- I'm tipping this is a reasonably small market...

(ie - savvy enough to use/explore your site while not knowing about fb/flickr/etc)

what % of the web use facebook?

my mother and father both use online services (eg ebay) and have never heard of facebook - they've both rang me up and asked me how to share photos they took online.

(I told them to use the me.com services, fwiw -- that'll be a huge competitor to "mom and pop" photo services)

>> blissfully unaware of fb?

Yes, indeed. I have a few friends who use fb and after some time they tend to think that "everyone is on the facebook". ;-) But actually not. There are many more people who don't know what fb is, or they don't use it.

oh absolutely agree that not everyone is on facebook.. (for example - all my younger cousins are only on myspace :P) (Also - I'm coming from Aus - where fb is #2 after google ahead of youtube, myspace, ebay, etc -- so my sample size may be biased..)

My point wasn't that there aren't millions of internet users who aren't on facebook - it's that there aren't millions of internet users who WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SHARING PHOTOS who aren't on a social network of some sort..

are you insane? Why do you think most people take photos? To remember and share memories.

How do you think most users of digital cameras share photos? via email? Print them out? You know, and I know those two methods are rubbish.

Even if there isn't millions of users - you'd only need a few thousand to get your startup rocking.

flickr etc = images + community... so go create images + technology.

that photo stuff we hear about from time to time, like face recognition or stitching together photos or turning them into videos or building 3d models of landmarks from tons of user photos... are any of those on photo sharing site yet?

Totally agree, look at animoto, they took an idea (slideshows) that had a clear market leader (slideshare) and its basically slideshows on crack.

They've even outdone themselves with the iphone app for example.

It would have to stand out clearly as there is so much competition from big and small players out there.

I think there is definitely room - in niche markets like traditional advertising where photos and other artwork comes from multiple sources, and where automation can really save money for your clients.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com