Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting

by supo • 14 years ago

37 50 14 years ago

Hi, this is a project I've been working on for about 2 months. I am definitely not a designer, so I tried to keep the GUI to minimum and really make the presentation about photos and as fluid as possible.

Any feedback welcome! :)

solidgumby• 14 years ago

Nice interface.

When you click on a picture, the slideshow should be paused by default. I found it annoying when the picture I was checking changed automatically.

I did not see the pause button at first sight, you should make it bigger and put it bottom center, and by default it should be a "play slideshow" button.

supo17• 14 years ago

Thanks! Good point about the slideshow. I asked a couple people and the opinions were about 50:50. Will gather some more feedback on this one :)

genwin• 14 years ago

When I clicked on a few pictures, they expanded, which I expected. Later (in Berlin) I clicked on a picture and got a slideshow. I much prefer seeing all the pictures and clicking on the ones I want to zoom in on. It is indeed a great interface. My vote is a "play slideshow" button; otherwise, make zooming in on the pic the behavior when a pic is clicked.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Er, I'd say that "Chrome-less" is a better description. You do have a GUI, it's just its chrome that is mostly invisible.

supo17• 14 years ago

Good point, fixed the title!

I am used to explaining to non-computer people and they have no idea what chrome is and GUI = buttons basically for them. :)

state• 14 years ago

"Because I want to share photos across all my online and offline personas - not tie them down to a single social network or app."

I'm personally happy to know that this is the underlying sentiment, and I'd guess that the photo community feels the same way.

supo17• 14 years ago

Yep, this is the key idea that makes/breaks dofsome as a product. I'm a hobby photographer myself and dofsome is aimed to fix my own problems, so in this way I hope it to be at least somewhat representative of other similar people's needs.

troymc• 14 years ago

Initial thoughts:

- "Dofsome... How am I supposed to pronounce that?" After a minute of hypotheses, I realized that it's a clever mashup of DOF (Depth of Field, i.e. photography jargon) and Awesome. I wonder how many people will figure that out. Maybe give a pronunciation hint somewhere, e.g. (pronounced DOFF-some). (Doff some? Doff some what? Some clothing? Is this an intentional double entendre?)

- The key feature, the full-width gallery of thumbnails, seems like a feature that would be easy for others to replicate. Google+ albums are already similar but with chrome around them. Squarespace has some templates with similar look; their hosting also starts at $8/month, but they offer way more than photo galleries/portfolios.

- I'm also reminded of Jux (jux.com) which is a beautiful idea. If you haven't explored their demos, please do! I'd happily pay for a Jux-based website, but they decided to be free, and so I won't go anywhere near them; why would I host my photos on a service that has no way to keep running long-term?

supo17• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

- Yeah, we were afraid that the name is too clever for System 1 [1] to understand. On the other hand it feels good once you get it and it makes you feel kinda like a photography insider :) Also I'm not a native English speaker, but my English friends could pronounce it even without having an idea about d.o.f.

- There is no single particularly clever part about this, just the G+ style grid made possible by on-the-fly image rendering/resizing with imgix.com [2] and the absence of chrome/distractions. My company is working on a much more advanced photo hosting solution and we basically launched this to have a really minimalistic service to which we will be able to trickle down advanced behind-the-curtain stuff once it is proven to work for users.

- will check jux.com out thanks!

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/... [2] imgix.com - these guys are just starting out so it is bumpy sometimes, but I've been recommending them because it is such a good idea

shawn-butler• 14 years ago

My initial response was that I would use it but I'm price sensitive thanks to 500px accounts ($20 & $50 yr).

Flickr also includes video so that might be something to iterate.

Maybe you could offer subdomain for that price?

Excellent design. I prefer the static display as default over the slideshow. I want to appreciate the image quality not use it as a digital frame.

wiradikusuma• 14 years ago

The video quality is not sharp and it's got ads from YouTube so it doesn't look professional. Other than that, congrats!

supo17• 14 years ago

Unfortunately youtube loads a resolution that is smaller or equal to the embedded frame, I didn't find a way to force full hd. If you full-screen it and then change the resolution, it should play nicely.

The adds are there because I might have mixed some copyrighted music in the background, will have to iterate on that.

In general, the youtube embedded videos are probably not a professional way of putting a video on a product homepage. But it is definitely the cheapest+easiest way.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

Try Vimeo instead of YouTube.

3amOpsGuy2• 14 years ago

I think you're missing a trick. Genuinely chrome-less could be pretty useful, and more attractive.

The small black navigation bar at the top of the screen could be done away with, if you change your URL structure to be more easily understood & manipulated.

From shoulder surfing various people of various levels of tech experience, i've noticed they are quite happy to edit a logically structured url in the address bar to navigate where they want to go quickly. For example, if the site doesn't provide an easy "up one level" ability.

imissmyjuno• 14 years ago

Argument against: some browsers don't show the URL, e.g. Firefox on Android, which shows the page title in the URL bar when the focus is away from the field.

3amOpsGuy2• 14 years ago

Safari for iOS is probably a less obscure example - as you scroll down the page, the address bar will scroll off screen.

These interactions are expected by their users, and they know how to navigate around them.

I wouldn't be hasty and say i don't think it'd be a material concern, on the contrary, it could make for some interesting A/B testing!

izak30• 14 years ago

Pretty sure my mom has never tried to guess a URL. URLs should be great, you should treat them as a first-class user interface, but not the only one.

supo17• 14 years ago

Wow that is a pretty extreme idea. With dofsome we wanted to achieve nice interface + smooth flow between photos (eg when you go photo -> grid, the photo you came from is highlighted etc).

This would probably be disrupted if you had to manually change the url and not just 'click on things'.

But as others are saying, we definitely have stuff to improve about urls (e.g. the album title in url etc).

fudged71• 14 years ago

If you use fullscreen, having to get to the URL bar can be challenging. I'd prefer a very simple navigation than needing to use the URL.

supo17• 14 years ago

Is the current navigation simple enough? Or maybe bigger click targets for the top bar?

tehabe• 14 years ago

The video is a nice idea but it would be better if I could browse the demo shown in the video myself, just try the UI out, w/o register, w/o uploading photos. Just see how it looks and works.

Edit: Just found the demo, but it is too close to the "Register" button. I didn't notice that it is a separate button.

powertower• 14 years ago

You should disable the Google Ads in the video.

nvr219• 14 years ago

I think this looks really slick. Good job!

supo17• 14 years ago

Thanks! I am not a front-end guy and this is really an experiment and a learning experience so this goes a long way :-)

supo17• 14 years ago

Thanks for the terrific feedback guys, here AND the UserVoice.

To be honest, I am super-surprised that nobody complained about the google-only login. Maybe a sampling bias here at HN?

donniefitz2• 14 years ago

I really like this. Great idea. The main issue I see is pricing. I would offer a yearly option. Also, creating a Lightroom plugin would go a long way with more serious photographers.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

Yearly pricing has ticket-shock - 8USD a month is nearly a hundred bucks, right now. And its a lot more hassle to refund than not collect.

Monthly pricing has big advantages.

supo17• 14 years ago

It is one thing to write the price on the homepage (it seems to me that a monthly smaller price is easier on the eyes than the yearly lump) and to actually charge, where you can offer a monthly and a slightly discounted yearly option.

LR plugin or really any kind of uploader would be nice, I'll definitely look into how hard it is to do the plugin. General desktop syncing with a full-blown GUI seems much harder.

epa3• 14 years ago

I think your pricing per month is a bit too high. Looks like a good service though.

supo17• 14 years ago

We are still trying to figure it out, but based on the feedback we got here we will probably bring it down a bit. I'd like to avoid multi-tiered pricing if at all possible.

What would be an acceptable price from your point of view? (it would also help to know a bit more about your relation to photography ;-)).

epa3• 14 years ago

Have been into web photography for around 5 years, past flickr pro user. Finding a upload service that accepts large (10 mb) photos has been tough. I just think the price is too high and $5 a month would be my target.

morsch2• 14 years ago

I'd like a way to be able to access a full-resolution version of the image. (Fwiw I didn't watch the video.)

I couldn't zoom in the image with with browser zoom (ctrl-+/wheelup), it breaks badly when I do that (Firefox nightly Ubuntu).

supo17• 14 years ago

Actually at one point I had a branch with a 1 step zooming functionality in the slideshow (basically a 2x zoom with a huge image download and 'follow-cursor' panning).

But I abandoned it to improve focus and simplify the UI.

Zooming on the client brings no additional details, so I doubt is very useful. Care to share a use-case for this?

morsch2• 14 years ago

Zooming in makes it easier to discern certain details. This is true, to a point, even if it increases the zoom beyond 1:1. This is increasingly true as the screen DPI get higher, and you can't make out individual pixels. Even zoomed in to 200%, a photo displayed on a "retina" iPad doesn't look jagged, it's just bigger. The same is true on a regular TFT viewed from a few feet away.

Apart from that, breaking browser zoom is just rude. It's a standard feature of the browser and apps/pages should never mess with it. I'm not saying you must have an application level zoom (e.g. by hooking the mwheel events), but breaking browser zoom is just not okay.

colmvp• 14 years ago

$8/month ($96/year) seems kind of steep considering that's more expensive than Flickr and 500px pro-type accounts.

FWIW I really like this idea and focus.

zapt02• 14 years ago

well-focused service in an interesting space. i'm not serious enough about photography to pay the price tag, but would love to see how this develops - best of luck to you.

e12e4• 14 years ago

Nice, looks like you've been annoyed at some of the same things I have for a while. A couple of questions:

1) Unlimited. So you will keep a copy my 1000s of 10-20mb RAW files for 8 USD/Month ?

2) Unlimited part two: How about a x/dollars/month > NxGB of storage (Where N is magic:)? IE: Some transparency towards your margins? And accounts for those that don't need quite 100USD/Year worth of service? I absolutely see that having a treshhold makes sense, but to me 8/Month seems high.

3) Since you're probably not* actually unlimited -- who are your target users? Someone with 1000s of high quality jpegs? Someone fed up with picasa/flickr/etc ? Do you have an actual roof on bandwidth?

4) The scaling: Do you do it browser side (ie: most of the pictures are rather shoddy quality compared to custom scaled/cropped images?)? Some of it server side, some browser side?

5) Which formats do you support? (Jpeg2000, other high quality formats?)

supo17• 14 years ago

Hi,

1) At the moment we only support jpg and png. So a copy of your 1000s of avg 10MB (max worst case global image size average, probably lower). Which is fine.

2+3) Our motivation with single tier was simplicity. Simplicity of the homepage, simplicity of thinking while you read something before you hit that 'Try' button..

I am not sure if a general user thinks about our margins and I can be wrong, but I think we should try to match the value he gets + position ourselves regarding to competition. If somebody cares about margins the S3 prices are a pretty good general storage reference point ;-)

To be completely transparent, we currently think that with an unlimited account we shouldn't get much more than ~40GB of jpegs from a user over his lifetime ON AVERAGE. Once this is amortized across big enough number of users I doubt it will get much more than that. zenfolio.com has been around for many many years and they have an unlimited account for $50/year and cater to professionals with huge files (think a wedding photographer who uploads couple GBs each other weekend).

Our average target user is not a pro (we are not aspiring to be a portfolio website at the moment) but has photography as a hobby and wants a clean no-bulshit way to upload and share his photos across online and offline personas.

4) All server side, with aggressive caching and on-the-fly scaling. No scaling on the client.

5) Just a jpeg and png to simplify the pipeline in MVP, if we see an interest in other formats we will investigate. Would you like to see a support for jpeg2000? For upload or also for serving? At the moment, the browser support seems still weak.

e12e4• 14 years ago

Thanks for your clear answers :-)

I absolutely see the simplicity argument. Personally I'm not sure if 8/month is too high though. I'll have to think about it -- with the (very swift) scaling on the server, I see more what you offer -- not sure if you really fit my use case though. But you're much nicer IMNHO than flickr/picasa.

I recently priced some storage and found that Amazon/Rackspace are at around 10 cents/GB/Month (without transfer...) and a cheap dedicated server would end up around 3 cents/GB/Month (with limited transfer -- free in, 5000GB/Month out) -- but this is for ~2TB of usable storage.

With overhead (all kinds, people, hosting, transfer) -- I suspect it's not very realistic (or rather, attractive) to compete with Amazon on price. I certainly don't need 2TB "in the cloud" right now... and can't quite justify paying for it... yet ;-)

As for formats, I see a use for jpeg2000/webp (yeah, looks like jpeg2000 is pretty much dead for web...) - and for DNG. But DNG would (for now) be for archival storage. Which may or may not be a use case you want to cover.

vhf• 14 years ago

Good questions and great answers !

About 5), (and possibly last paragraph of 2+3)), I would like to see all RAW files supported. You mentionned DNG, I guess you're a Nikon user. I'm not. And I'm right your target user : (I'm Swiss,) not a pro, not looking for an on-line portfolio, but former photographer now doing it as a hobby. When not shooting film I only shoot RAW, and mine are .cr2, not .dng.

Long-term archiving of my digital pictures (be it png, jpg, cr2, png, scanner raw format) has been a concern for quite a long time. I have been a paying flickr user for a few years now but it doesn't fit my needs as I cannot store there my RAW files. I would definately pay 8$/m to have a safe backup somewhere, and your display / scaling / serving service would be a huge +. :)

zmmmmm• 14 years ago

Is your target professionals or consumers?

As a consumer I'm always incredibly wary of things that seem too good to be true. I don't understand how you can scale the economics of $8/month with unlimited storage. When I see that it induces scepticism that you'll be around for the long term, and one thing I really do not want is my lifetime archive of photos suddenly disappearing on me one day.

A second point - for me these days, getting photos uploaded to storage is as key as the storage itself. If you have a story about that (smart phone apps, background uploaders, APIs, dropbox, picasa, flickr or other integration) then I would like to see it. The drag and drop is neat, but it doesn't work at scale. I want something that's going to upload the photos automatically.

supo17• 14 years ago

Hi,

zenfolio.com and similar cater to a professional market where people shoot photos for a living, e.g. events like weddings & ceremonies and they upload lots of big files. And they offer an unlimited account for $50/year. In this case it is always important how the average volume amortizes across a big user base.

Yep, an uploader would be neat but it gets really ugly really fast with many different platforms to think about.

The problem with an import from other services seems to be image quality (services like social networks) or API availability (photo hosting services for pro photographers).

The drag'n'drop is the best we could do on the "our effort"/"user convenience" scale for an MVP, I am definitely thinking hard about ways to get in images fast and in the original quality.

Maybe the right way is to focus on dropbox/backup storage imports.

If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them :)

e12e4• 14 years ago

  > an uploader would be neat but it gets really ugly really
  > fast with many different platforms to think about.

Support webdav (or sftp). There are good free dav-clients for windows now (and all the other os' have supported webdav for years). Webdav should be easier to integrate with an existing infrastructure based around http.

edit: You might even easily create your own webdav-client for windows (the black sheep when it comes to dav-support), either working off existing dav-libraries, or possibly by throwing some money at an existing free/shareware project.

Gmo2• 14 years ago

Maybe that's too late for you to see it, but it would be great if there would be other login possibilities than google.

supo17• 14 years ago

Any other authentication provider you had in mind, or just a direct login?

Gmo2• 14 years ago

Hum, even less likely you would see that one, but I meant direct login (or Mozilla Persona)

Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting

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