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Comment by robotmay | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually trying to build a somewhat alternative to 500px/Flickr at the moment, and one area I'm really concentrating on is the EXIF data. I'm actually thinking of giving users more control over what data is kept inside their photos after they upload them, and allowing data added via the web UI to be written back into the images.

It'd be nice just to have standard locations for the sodding data in the EXIF though, if I'm honest :)

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EXIF has always seemed a crappy solution to a crappy problem, but it's what we've got and it's what we have to work with.

Interesting you're going after Flickr/500px though, there's a definite market there but I'd have thought a lot of people were either stuck in their ways or transitioning to 500px from Flickr.

Aye, I'm not sure how big a market I'll have at the moment. The goal is actually to build a community somewhere between the two, as there are parts of both I don't like. I'd like to promote constructive criticism rather than fanboy comments, and do away with ratings (which are my main problem with 500px). I also find that none of these sites have yet figured out how to help you discover great photos, which I'm hoping to find a better solution for.

I'm trying to get the basics up in the next couple of weeks so that I can start working on more specific features :)

As long as it's easy to get photos into it, I imagine there's plenty of photographers who'll use multiple services.

Post it up when you're ready to launch, I'd be interested.

I'll have multiple file drag & drop in for the very first release, but after that I'm hoping to implement the ability to import from other services. And further down the line I'd love to be able to offer Lightroom/Aperture plugins for exporting photos directly to the site.

HN will be one of my first stops when I launch it, as I'd like knowledgeable beta testers!

Finally managed to get it launched in beta, if you fancied taking a look! http://photographer.io

You should also support xmp. It is an XML format that gets embedded and isn't quite as much of a mess as exif. It also is a common metadata standard that applies to more than just image files.

I'll add it to my feature list! I'm keen to provide as many options as possible for parsing data from the photos.

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