Snapjoy (YC S11) unveils Flickraft, one-click migration for Flickr users

http://www.flickraft.com

by jpren • 14 years ago

122 66 14 years ago

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

I think you might be violating some trademarks with that name...

artursapek2• 14 years ago

I'm actually curious if this is a violation. Does anyone know? The font is definitely different and the F is even capitalized on the boat graphic, though the colors are the same and the name "flickr" is in there. It makes me think of those cereal brands that try to make you think they're the popular brand by dancing as closely as trademark law lets them.

arctangent2• 14 years ago

Back in the day I was the first person to create a service using the Flickr API, so that the Flickr folks could show off their API when they launched. I called my demo app reviewr.com [1]

My original choice of colour scheme was (deliberately) very close to what Flickr was using at the time, and Stewart Butterfield (who ran the show back then) asked me to change the colours a bit.

I don't recall Stewart having a problem with me dropping a vowel in the domain name, even though at the time this was a novel domain hack on the part of Flickr.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040406000559/http://reviewr.com...

swalsh• 14 years ago

It would be nice if I could also rescue some pictures from facebook too. Double brownie points if your software can automatically remove duplicates in the process.

brlewis4• 14 years ago

Snapjoy automatically organizes using metadata, which Facebook strips out. That plus recompression make it difficult to detect duplicates from Facebook.

masnick• 14 years ago

This is great -- I've been looking for a way to get my photos off Flickr before my pro account expires this May. Snapjoy sucked in 2200 photos in just a few minutes.

(The only glitch was when I clicked "Get Started Now" on the flickraft site, it just redirected me to snapjoy.com. I had to manually go into my settings and connect my Flickr account, which triggered the import automagically.)

dy• 14 years ago

I guess I'm starting to get jaded... I remember when Flickr was the liferaft of Yahoo Photos and then even before that when Yahoo Photos was the liferaft of Kodak Galleries.

I still don't have a photo storage solution that I'm happy with - but I'm hoping that in 10 years or so Google will have indexed the three or four hard drives in my storage unit and placed them into Picasa X.

cfinke2• 14 years ago

With Flickr, I get unlimited storage for $24/year. I'm probably nearing 100GB of photos there, so in order to store those same photos with Snapjoy, it would cost me $120/year. What's the extra value that I get for an additional $100/year?

And does Snapjoy integrate with iPhoto? I use Flickrfriend for iPhoto now to sync Flickr and iPhoto, but if I don't have a way to sync Snapjoy and iPhoto, it's a non-starter.

latchkey• 14 years ago

The marketing is really funny, but I had the same thought pattern.

I looked on flickr and I have 15,711 pictures. It would cost me $60 a year on Snapjoy. Even if Snapjoy, which is still in beta, is better than good old reliable trusty flickr, that pricing is a non-starter for me.

What I really want to see is someone come up with a one click export to Picassa where I don't have to download all the pix first.

subpixel3• 14 years ago

I don't think FlickrFriend is available or supported anymore: http://unpaq.com/software/flickrfriend/

cfinke2• 14 years ago

That's sad. At least the copy I have still works.

bigiain2• 14 years ago

<snarky>Perhaps some peace of mind that with ~5 times the revenue-per-customer Snapjoy might survive and even thrive, where Yahoo's revolving-door CEO office with it's mandatory new-blood costcutting chestbeating puts Flickr's long term outlook in serious doubt?<.snarky>

zalew3• 14 years ago

I fail to see how Flickr is a 'sinking ship'.

btw to all the photo app creators out there: no API - no go.

masukomi• 14 years ago

Yeah, I have to agree on both points. I feel like I missed a memo about Flickr going down. AFAIK Flickr isn't even leaking, never-mind sinking... Am I wrong? Have I missed something?

And API is one of the things that makes Flickr great, Snapjoy may have a sweet web interface but that's not enough. I'm guessing from the fact that they have a GitHub account that they'll release an API when the code has settled down a bit more internally, so that's probably just a short-term issue.

The pricing though... the pricing isn't even remotely comparable. You gotta give me a damn good reason to spend that much more money on a competing tool that basically just hosts my images and makes them easily viewable.

shashashasha• 14 years ago

Having been around conversations with some of the old Flickr people, I have to disagree. It's definitely sinking, and has been slowly gutted over the past few years. This is only the most recent piece of news: http://nolancaudill.com/2012/01/30/the-front-line/

All of the core Flickr people have left, and some (like Aaron Straup Cope) are starting to build their own: http://straup.github.com/parallel-flickr/ http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2011/10/14/pixelspace/#para...

mortenjorck• 14 years ago

If I used Flickr for photo storage, I might consider leaving, however, I have hard drives for that. I use Flickr for the community, and until some other site even begins to approach the number of talented photographers that Flickr's userbase has, I have no intention of bailing.

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

Would you say Yahoo is a sinking ship? Yahoo owns Flickr.

jeffreymcmanus2• 14 years ago

that's kind of the point.

nicksergeant• 14 years ago

Yes, Yahoo! does appear to be a sinking ship, by all accounts.

zargon• 14 years ago

Agreed. Snapjoy doesn't even let you exhibit your photos publicly.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Neither does Instagram, really.

aresant• 14 years ago

Snapfish, DropBox, and several of the other large photo / filing sharing sites are essentially a UI for Amazon's S3 cloud.

I pay for dropbox primarily to store family photos & videos.

In fact the stuff I need to back-up that fits outside that category would fit in a free, or lower priced dropbox plan.

I would switch based on price alone since photos are fairly static, non-changing, and the #1 concern is that they survive a hard disk crash.

I wonder when Amazon just decides to go and own this market by offering a better photo UI, or buys somebody to do it for them.

Amazon has already shown they have no fear of running over profitable customer segments (eg they launched Prime Video while also counting NetFlix as a huge client).

justincormack• 14 years ago

More interested in something like open photo that is just forkable software and I pay for S3 http://theopenphotoproject.org/

aaronpk2• 14 years ago

Agreed! I really like the open photo project. I started making my own photo backup site as well: https://github.com/aaronpk/Flickr-Archiver I suspect we'll see many more attempts at building a solid photo archiving site before Flickr completely disappears.

waterside81• 14 years ago

I'd very surprised if Amazon or anyone comes up with a better UX/UI than Dropbox. It has to be one of the best designed, engineered, and executed startups in a long time. Whenever I use it share between my iPhone, iPad, laptop and ubuntu server, I'm amazed on how well it just works. To say it's "just a UI for S3" is a little simplistic.

garry• 14 years ago

Snapfish and all other photo sharing sites lack one fundamental thing that any photo enthusiast will identify immediately as one of the biggest problems.

Image de-duplication.

Snapjoy has the only image de-duplicating algorithm that I've seen that really works.

brlewis4• 14 years ago

Did you try the de-duplicating on http://ourdoings.com/ and if so what didn't work about it?

stuntmouse• 14 years ago

"5GB's" should be "5GBs".

antidaily2• 14 years ago

Hate those kind of copywriting error's.

nateberkopec• 14 years ago

Trolling is a art.

jpren• 14 years ago

Thanks for pointing that out! Fixed now.

jakequist• 14 years ago

Snapjoy is awesome. I've been using it for a few months and have never looked back.

subpixel3• 14 years ago

I agree - Snapjoy is fast, beautiful, and simple. They can win by doing less than the competition. Personally, I can't take the bloat and feature-creep that has turned Flickr into a giant hassle. Just getting your photos into Flickr has been a hurdle from day one, with no official app for iPhoto.

That's not to say there aren't Snapjoy features I want to see: the ability to create/share collections that span multiple dates/moments is at the top of the list.

But as soon as I started using Snapjoy I knew it had massive potential. I especially love the default timeline view, it puts just enough structure around your photos for discoverability, etc.

EDIT: I would love to be able to pay annually and save, though. $15 month is a lot of coin for a non-business app.

mlapida2• 14 years ago

On the surface I love this idea. Flickr has been stagnant for years and starting to worry me. I don't mind paying for a photo sharing service but the market sure is saturated. I'll be looking for a little more than a pretty, overpriced UI over Amazon's S3.

Wouldn't it be great if a company came around and offered front ends for S3. One for photo sharing, one for docs. You could switch them out like skins. Your data is in one place and never moves. If a competitor comes along with a better front-end, you could change to them.

That would also be nice, because then you could have one monthly fee for all of you online storage needs. Let's be honest, they're all hosted by Amazon anyway.

subpixel3• 14 years ago

openphoto.me is what you're describing

mlapida2• 14 years ago

giving it a whirl now. thanks!

underwater• 14 years ago

This seems petty and a bit desperate.

The site is also broken. I can't click on the logo to find out more about Snapjoy. Pass.

rokhayakebe• 14 years ago

Do you guys know of companies launching a side project which ended being bigger than their main business?

ssharp• 14 years ago

This is tacky on two levels:

1) it just attacks flickr without really giving any reason. Flickr is a sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe Snapjoy is going to outlast Flickr?

2) Using the image of a sinking cruise ship weeks after a cruise ship wreck killed at least 17 people. I'm not easily offended, and this didn't personally offend me, but it's pretty much the first thing I thought of when I saw a drawing of a sinking cruise ship. Why run the risk?

cannuk• 14 years ago

I thought the same thing regarding flickr being a sinking ship. The first thing I did was go to google news to make sure I had not missed something.

jeffreymcmanus2• 14 years ago

It's not "tacky," it's business. Products are not your friends. They don't have feelings.

mvanveen2• 14 years ago

> Flickr is a sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe Snapjoy is going to outlast Flickr?

  s/Flickr/del\.icio\.us/g
  s/SnapJoy/pinboard/g

For the regex-impaired, swap Flickr with delicious and Snapjoy with pinboard.

When I found out that del.icio.us was falling apart, the discovery of pinboard was a remarkable discovery! The founder posted a link to a migration tool that allowed me painlessly keep thousands of my old bookmarks. Just by itself that was reason enough for me to support them.

I can't speak to the long term viability of pinboard or SnapJoy, but that's true of a lot of web services, frankly. A few years ago you would've seemed crazy for calling Flickr a "sinking ship."

MattGrommes• 14 years ago

I'm getting an error saying Snapjoy's API key isn't valid. Guess Flickr didn't appreciate this marketing stunt.

benatkin• 14 years ago

I got that too.

ramanujam• 14 years ago

UnifyPhotos http://export.goyaka.com lets you move your Flickr photos to Facebook.

Interesting note mentioned there - "I love snapjoy's UI. But they don't allow import from flickr. Also, social circle in Snapjoy is something I have to build. Facebook fits the bill."

snowmaker• 14 years ago

I love the infographic and the one-sentence pitch. It's funny, it's totally clear why I should use it, and I'll never forget it.

People here are saying that they're jumping the gun and Flickr isn't sinking yet. Maybe that's true. But great marketing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that's what this looks like to me.

antidaily2• 14 years ago

Annnnnd Flickr just blocked their API key. https://twitter.com/#!/garrytan/status/167030905821605888

zalew3• 14 years ago

because they hit their query per hour limits.

mvanveen2• 14 years ago

This is not unprecedented. We did this years ago with Zooomr. There was a tech crunch post about it: http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/16/why-is-flickr-afraid-of-zoo...

Many Flickr users were not happy when they discovered that the ability to migrate their accounts was considered "burn[ing] bandwidth and CPU cycles."

My co-founder, Kris, was quoted with the following:

> Tate from Zooomr says that the exports are a cost of doing business, that Web 2.0 is where “the roach motel stops” and that Zooomr will always make it easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere

Props to Snapjoy for creating an awesome product and giving people freedom. I hope that you guys get your license key back!

lurker17• 14 years ago

Snapjoy doesn't give people freedom, it just takes over from Flickr. Flickr gives people more freedom, by letting users download their files.

codenerdz• 14 years ago

At least Flickr has an API if you want to pull your data out.

Snapjoy doesnt :)

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

Does Snapjoy work well with photo organization apps like Aperture?

I've hit the 100GB limit on Dropbox, and I'd like to be able to view albums on the web.

sriramk• 14 years ago

[disclaimer: see my profile for my involvement with Yahoo, I have no connection with this particular incident/Flickr/etc]

This and the TC post annoy me because Snapjoy (or perhaps the tech press) is trying to spin this into some underdog vs evil big company story when it isn't.

For example, when Snapjoy says "We tried our best to stay within Flickr’s API limits, but the overwhelmingly positive response has exceeded our expectations.", what they are really saying is that they didn't implement rate limiting correctly.

And when they say "We’re a bit surprised that the key was disabled almost immediately after we reached the limit.", what they're saying is that Flickr actually did implement said limiting correctly (don't have personal knowledge, assume that's what happened).

I also like the spin from the tech press on this somehow meaning that your photos are locked into Flickr when Snapjoy has neither an API or any other mechanism to get photos out - all I see is a promise of a future feature to sync to Dropbox/S3.

I completely understand the PR game being played here but I wish it needn't be this way. Especially since Snapjoy seems to be a very slick product from a very talented team.

And all this ignoring the issues with the name - I'm not sure how it is ok to use a derivative of your competitor's name to build something designed to take users away from them.

zeroboy• 14 years ago

Sorry. I'm not leaving Flickr. It's one of my favorite spots on the Internet. I love the community aspect of the site and the countless quality (and not so quality) Creative Commons contributions.

I have spent more hours than I'd care to admit sifting through photos, admiring people's work, reading comments - all the while listening to trip hop or whatever is on SOMAFM.

It's one of the best parts of website design: finding the perfect image. I'm not going anywhere.

bigiain2• 14 years ago

"I love the community aspect of the site … "

This. 1000 times this. I _so_ often hear geeks saying "It's easy to leave Flickr, just host your photos on S3/Dropbox/your-own-web-hosting! Done!". That misses out on a _lot_ of what keeps people on Flickr. The social/community/discoverability side of it.

I suspect Flickr's successor will either:

1) be a service which provides all that "social/community/discoverability" stuff while letting users choose which of many backends actually do their photo storage (openphoto might be a first contender here),

or 2) one of the existing social networks will steamroller over the entire photo sharing space (Facebook seems to be gaining considerable momentum down this path).

alagu• 14 years ago

We built UnifyPhotos - http://export.goyaka.com a month back, which moved photos from Flickr to Facebook. We moved more than 850k photos.

I can say that the API limiting here is an implementation issue. Instead of querying information about each photo, if you could pass meta information (date_upload,geo,date_taken,icon_server,original_format, url_sq,url_o,url_m,url_b,description) while doing photosets.getPhotos, you don't have to query for each photo.

Snapjoy (YC S11) unveils Flickraft, one-click migration for Flickr users

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