Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbouw | Hacker News Reader

Simple, useful, great UI and best of all no account required.

Awesome job.

Only question is regarding the switch between view-only and collaborative. When I choose to allow friends to contribute to the album, the provided link doesn't change.

I assume you have a view-only link and an edit link that is passed a var to allow people to modify it. How does this work in your application?

View on HN

Yes, right now the "view-only" link becomes a collaborative album through a boolean set in the database. I'd be happy to create a separate url if you think that would make it more obvious.

Just thinking out loud but if I went on a hiking trip with a couple of friends and we all wanted to show off an album of pictures to other, it makes sense I would give a view-only link to people who wanted to view the album and an edit link to those who came on the trip to contribute photos.

It could be something as simple as selecting "Yes" generates an edit var with the associated link. If someone pastes the edit URL into their browser and the edit var = the album id, allow edit. Else force view only.

Edit* This is just an opinion and what logically makes sense to me. Would love to hear what others think.

I actually debated this quite a bit and went back and forth on it. I eventually decided that I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and figured that people might have a bunch of people add photos and then they could switch it to view-only to share with other people. Or they could create a copy of the album that they can reorder and delete extraneous photos that they can share in view-only mode.

I'd certainly consider tweaking it, though, to make it possible to share a view-only and collaborative album simultaneously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com