6 ms·

Show HN: Myphotos.site – Make a gallery website from Google Photos

195 points by gabigrin 2y ago

Hey HN! My friend and I love taking pictures on our phones, and we were looking for a super simple way to share them with the world. Google Photos albums are nice, but the result isn't slick enough and lacks customization options (embed, custom domain). That's why we built myphotos.site - a micro SaaS that allows anyone to create a slick, minimal gallery website from Google Photos. Galleries can be iframe-embedded for those looking for full customization. One thing we haven't solved yet - many Google Photos users (myself included) do not have images pre-organized in albums, so the fact that technically it takes 60 seconds to build a website doesn't take into account that you have to spend time picking the right images. Would love to some feedback/ideas from hobbyist photographers here!

TomK32 2y ago
Reminds me of one of my earliest Ruby on Rails apps, some 14 years ago: Using the flickr api, the whole app white-labelled for custom domains etc... never got any traction.
mtmail 2y ago
Great website and the pricing makes sense. Some links still go to gphotos.site (automatic redirected). I tried so see how easy the iframe feature is, or rather if a non-technical person would understand the documentation. But the guides seem to be mostly AI generated SEO. Quickly the good impression of personal photos from genuine authors of the website turned into gen-AI slob https://www.myphotos.site/platforms/wordpress https://www.myphotos.site/platforms/wordpress
- gabigrin 2y ago
  Thanks! Re: links, will fix it. That was the original domain but Google didn't approve it, and we can totally understand why. Embed - it is a feature we pushed yesterday so still no proper documentation on that. It's as simple as importing images -> clicking on an "embed" button and grabbing the iframe code. Requires some technical understanding. We might improve to be platform-specific (Webflow, Wix) if there's a real need. And as for the guides you're seeing are complete gen-AI slob, I agree. Not something we're that proud of, but mostly for SEO to be able to acquire users at a reasonable price. We're running ads campaigns but with our low pricing, it'll be really hard to be profitable so SEO is one way.
  - have_faith 2y ago
    I work on landing pages occasionally that have to account for SEO so can definitely sympathise with the uphill battle here. Like the OP, I was immediately put off of the "brand" when I saw the flood of AI stuff. It's like seeing how the sausage is made. I think there's an extra level of trust that needs building from a branding perspective because of how personal it feels to hand over personal images to someone to host for you, even if they become public anyway. It's interesting to see how people react to this sort of thing as it's very new. Good luck!
    - orlevco 2y ago
      Co-founder of MyPhotos here, You're right about trust being important. We're working hard to show that we're real people with good intentions. I actually didn't consider that using AI to generate some blogposts (that aren't the main content of the site) would have negative impact on how people perceive the product. So thanks, we appreciate the feedback and will take it into account moving forward.
      - wrycoder 2y ago
        The problem for me is not the SEO, but the vast AI blather, which is virtually content-free. You need a complete rewrite by an experienced human. After reading and reading, all I found was subjective comments about how great all the features are, without any information about the features themselves. What is your relation to Google? Can photos only come into your site from Google?
      - aziaziazi 2y ago
        > I actually didn't consider that using AI to generate some blogposts (that aren't the main content of the site) would have negative impact on how people perceive the product. As a cofounder you already know your product. I don’t, and one quick and easy way to discover is crawling your site (testing your product comes second as I need a bit of confidence before sharing my google credentials). Bad copyrighting (ai gen or not) depict one interest of having more customer while not much interest in sharing useful information on the subject. I don’t know about your motives so I can only trust you "are real people with good intention" and wish you good luck, but as an anonymous visitor I surely would have passed my way. If the guide posts aren’t mean for humans but the robots, maybe hide the link in a SEO friendly way? 10px off screen or z-indexed bellow another block for exemple. Also a header disclaimer would be very appreciated: "Content for SEO, back home"
- dinosaurbone 2y ago
  I would be concerned that it also flies a bit too close to the sun with the gen AI photos; if one of the primary markets is creatives who are trying to showcase their (non-AI) photos, it doesn't inspire confidence to see the company they're entrusting with that task to seemingly disregard the field they're in.
- cryptozeus 2y ago
  Agree ! Please remove those tacky ai stock photos !
darubramha 2y ago
Looks awesome, and will help quick galleries to be created. I wanted to build something similar, but at that time photos did not expose APIs to get list of photos. What was your work around? Or have they opened up the APIs now?
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  Curious about this aswell
- mxuribe 2y ago
  I'm not affiliated with this effort, but would the following google api suffice? https://developers.google.com/photos https://developers.google.com/photos
- gabigrin 2y ago
  Thanks! We're using the Google Picker API - https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/reference/rest https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/reference/rest You create a picker "session" which is a link where the user can select images from Google's side. Then you poll the session and once the user is done, you can get access to the media items (imgs and videos) that the user selected. At first, we wanted to auto-sync galleries and were bummed by the way this API works, but tbh it ended up being more private and secure for the user (no auto-syncing that embarrassing picture that shouldn't be online) and helped us avoid implementing a picker on our end.
  - gnaman 2y ago
    How long is the session active for? Do you store these photos on your servers?
    - gabigrin 2y ago
      The session is active for couple of hours IIRC. Once the user is done with the selection we upload the images to our servers (Supabase storage) and delete the GPhotos session.
sigmar 2y ago
probably entirely google's fault, but I can't seem to pick a folder when I'm brought to the google photos search box. it only finds individual photos
- gabigrin 2y ago
  It's far from ideal but if you search for an album, you can quickly select all of it. Here's a video of Or, my co-founder showing that - https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=LQu8fJBDflVR11Rs&t=38 https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=LQu8fJBDflVR11Rs&t=38 (links to the exact second)
croisillon 2y ago
as someone who has been involved in gallery making in the past, i love it
- orlevco 2y ago
  That's cool to hear! Was there anything specific that sucked about how you had to do it then? We'd love to hear more to understand what problems we could solve better.
  - croisillon 2y ago
    i think my main problem was the balance between overengineering (like the possibility to have white borders and shit) and making it user-friendly
    - gabigrin 2y ago
      sounds relatable :D
ddtaylor 2y ago
I appreciate the presentation and simplicity. You did a good job of presenting it.
yapyap 2y ago
the website itself looks very Template-y, now if that’s not of concern just ignore I said anything but that’s always what comes to mind when I visit a new website, like anecdotally I also hate it when a website has gone the whole extra mile to customize their website and then you check out and see the monotonous, bland things that are the stripe checkout buttons & page. Don’t get me wrong, I get why from a backend perspective, totally. It’s just takes you out of the whole immersion in the website (design)
- gabigrin 2y ago
  The "give users full control" vs. "help the user reach a fine result" tension is real. Our take on that is allowing pro-users who want full control to embed their gallery in their website. We can't nor want to compete with full-blown website builders on customization features.
cj 2y ago
Awesome nice work! Does this work for video? I recently digitized about 80 home videos from 30-40 years ago. Each of the 80 videos is 2 hours of 5-10 minute recordings from the olden days when turning "record" on and off didn't automatically create a new video file. I've been wondering the best way to post-edit and share them with other people in my family.
- orlevco 2y ago
  Co-founder of MyPhotos here, First of all - thanks! Re: Videos - we currently don't support them but might add that capability in the future. Videos complicate things both in terms of the product and because they're much more expensive to store, so they'll complicate the unit economics. Regardless - online video storage is currently very expensive. The leading platforms are Vimeo and Wistia, so you might consider them for now. About editing - what are you looking to do? I'll try to point you in the right direction. Or
  - atonse 2y ago
    Check out Cloudflare Stream and see if their prices might work.
    - gabigrin 2y ago
      Will do! thank you
    - tricked 2y ago
      you can also store the videos on plain r2 you just have to do a bit more manual work but its cheaper
  - indigodaddy 2y ago
    You could get uncloudy and go with a provider with unmetered bandwidth and then use their storage slabs which present as block devices up to 10TB. So you could string together a PV/VG with eight 10TB slabs on a single server. I’d suspect the storage cost of this approach might even be similar or less than AWS glacier storage.. BuyVM has been around for a long time and very stable and excellent reputation. You’ll find that your costs would be much lower if you’d “uncloud” (I’m obviously assuming that you are using AWS or a cloud, but maybe not!) https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/ https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/
almog 2y ago
I often use Photos album link sharing option. Have never tried to embed in in an existing page, is that the problem it is solving at the moment (and relocating the images though I am not sure what that entails in terms of usage rights)? I must have missed something otherwise.
- orlevco 2y ago
  For simply sharing specific photos - GPhotos' native share feature is great. Our product is for people who are looking for a more advanced publishing option. Something like a website or portfolio, but super quick and easy to create. Does that make sense?
a012 2y ago
If user delete photos on Google side, are they also removed from your service? And also what's the retention of user data on your service once I cancel my account?
- gabigrin 2y ago
  No, the Google Photos integration is uni-directional. We only get access to images users pick in the import phase. Removing images from MyPhotos is done from the platform itself. Regarding retention - we'll delete all your data if you wish to cancel your account.
rishikeshs 2y ago
Hi great idea! I was also trying to build something similar for photographers! But who are your target audience? How is this different from sharing a public album link?
dirkc 2y ago
Well done launching! I had a quick look at the example site linked in the footer and I like it. I've spent way too much time messing around with layouts for image galleries with different aspect ratio photos. Looks like you're using a masonry layout. Any thoughts on masonry vs something like flickr's layout?
jazzyjackson 2y ago
Sorry to be critical but $15/m before allowing custom domain is not a good value IMO, that's right up there with squarespace and they'll register the domain for me at that price This is very much a solution to a problem I have, too, one that was taken care of by Google Business sites before they threw it in the bin https://support.google.com/business/answer/https://support.google.com/business/answer/14368911?hl=en?hl=en https://support.google.com/business/answer/https://support.g...
- gabigrin 2y ago
  That's a valid point. We're still experimenting with pricing and this is great feeback
mohammedhdotio 2y ago
[flagged]
yoble 2y ago
My mom is an avid traveler who takes a ton of photos and puts them on albums she then shares with the family, and a while ago she was asking if I had a solution so she could have a website where all her albums are listed. She wanted to not have to share a new link each time, and have people easily look up older ones. I didn't have any easy solution and this looks promising, congrats! A few dealbreaker things I can share: - she has lots of albums already on gphoto. She'd need to easily import them. - she makes heavy use of the map and text blocks you can add in gphoto albums, which makes each album a kind of travel diary. I don't get the sense these are supported in your product yet, these would be required for her. - she doesn't have a ton of videos but sometimes she does have a few. - I'd have some concerns about the longevity of your product - if she invests time into it she wants to be able to look back at the albums in 10-20 years time. Having a convenient way to export the albums would be reassuring to me. - I think she has a few 1000s photos in those albums, so your highest tier would be too low for her, if there was a way to buy storage that might suit her usage better (though she has a hobbyist budget). It might be technically difficult and you rejected that path already, but I'm thinking an ideal way for her would be to keep editing her albums in gphotos and sync them to your site, which would take care of the longevity concerns and allow her to keep using the interface she knows (if you linked directly to the pics/vids on google server that would eliminate the cost of storing pictures for you, but I assume that's impossible or prohibited by google's tos). Anyway, just sharing my use case in case that's useful but congrats on launching and on the good looking product!
- tyrust 2y ago
  > she could have a website where all her albums are listed. She wanted to not have to share a new link each time, and have people easily look up older ones. Would a static site with a list of links to Google Photos albums work? I've done this with my family. If so, there are ample static website providers out there.
- orlevco 2y ago
  First of all, your mom sounds awesome. Second, thanks for the detailed thoughts! Easy import of existing albums - We have that! find the album on GPhotos, select all and import. Check out how quick it is here: https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=Wk1wtDoPO5_DYWEV https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=Wk1wtDoPO5_DYWEV Map and text blocks - These are currently not supported, but we're still considering different use cases and will add features to match the ones we focus on soon. Videos - These are currently not supported but might be added soon. They pose some storage and pricing issues but we'll try to solve that. Again depending on the use case we end up pursuing Longevity - This is a legitimate concern. Obviously we're hoping that this product keeps growing and plan to maintain it. Regardless - The north star of this product is to be fast and easy to set up. So we hope that the time investment won't be that big anyhow. Pricing and Storage - We've just launched so the pricing plans will definitely change over time. We'll take that into account. Syncing albums - Seamlessly syncing albums to online galleries was our dream. Unfortunately Google's API doesn't support that (for obvious security and privacy concerns). We'd love for your mom to give our product a try and will be happy to give her a generous period of free usage of the premium plan for some of her feedback. If you're interested, please reach out at hey@myphotos.site. Thanks again! Or
welder 2y ago
Reminds me of a 13 year old GitHub project back when Google Photos was called Picasa: https://github.com/alanhamlett/jQuery-Picasa-Gallery https://github.com/alanhamlett/jQuery-Picasa-Gallery
- gabigrin 2y ago
  That's cool! thanks for sharing
dc_rog 2y ago
Super cool. Typo here “Show your art, keep friends up-to-date or share family photos with lode ones.”
mrccc 2y ago
Have you looked into row-based presentation of the images? I usually feel like pages with row-based image grids have a higher-quality look to them. See e.g. [1] and [2] for more info and [3] for an implementation. [1]: https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 [2]: https://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/google-plus-layout-find-best-breaks.html https://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/google-plus-layout-find-be... [3]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-photo-gallery https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-photo-gallery
- orlevco 2y ago
  Super interesting. Thanks for the detailed thoughts and link. The thinking behind the vertical masonry grid is that by always having semi-visible pictures in view it draws the eyes down to keep scrolling. If that makes sense. Will definitely check out the links and consider further. Or
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
podviaznikov 2y ago
very cool. last year I made similar for Apple Photos(but it's on pause now). https://public.photos https://public.photos
- orlevco 2y ago
  That's super cool Anton! Your way of uploading the albums is really neat. Haven't thought about that. Do you mind sharing more? How did that work out for you? Did you encounter any technical issues with working with Apple's app? Why did you end up pausing the project? Would love to hear from you, Or
  - podviaznikov 2y ago
    I have few other projects like that and this one is one of the least popular. So I paused it. Also on top of that dealing with photos and videos are not cheap and would be harder for me to scale things. Basically it was a fun little experiment.
- ggandhi 2y ago
  This is super cool, just like the www.myphotos.site. Just need a nice UI and options to share/hide album.
october-freedom 2y ago
boycott, divest, sanction
cryptozeus 2y ago
Good execution but why can’t someone just upload the pics on blog or Wordpress and do the same ?
- orlevco 2y ago
  This is simply much faster and easier than any other way. Wordpress and other blog sites require quite a lot of effort and technical knowledge. We aim to democratize photo sharing and let anyone do it quickly and effortlessly. Does that make sense?
haarts 2y ago
The one feature I'm always missing is password protection; I don't want everyone to see my travel pictures.
- gabigrin 2y ago
  Great feedback! Not just great, but 100% made sense to go ahead and ship it real quick. It's live! https://youtu.be/qhHHPHDnMTc https://youtu.be/qhHHPHDnMTc (and server-side secure!)
  - haarts 2y ago
    Holy hell, that was fast! I'm gonna spread this far and wide.
spike021 2y ago
Something to consider, adobe Lightroom has a feature coupled with adobe portfolio (iirc that's the name of the product) where if you use Lightroom you can turn albums into sites. Similar idea on paper. May be useful to compare how theirs works since that could be a competitor of sorts.
krat0sprakhar 2y ago
Really good execution! I was definitely looking for something like this - so great job in working on a real problem. I think the pricing might be a bit tricky. The free plan allows 50 photos whereas the free plan on Flickr allows 1000 photos (and no limit on albums IIRC). Can you elaborate a bit on how you plan to differentiate?
- orlevco 2y ago
  Thank you! Pricing is indeed something we're still trying to figure out. Currently we see differentiation as a combination of simplicity and elegance/visual quality. Meaning platforms like Flicker are too cluttered and outdated in terms of how galleries look. But in this too we still have a lot to learn and figure out.
ibzsy 2y ago
really cool
philsnow 2y ago
One of the things I would want included is any and all metadata / tags that Google Photos adds to photos. For instance: - inferred/corrected geotags - inferred/corrected time of day - names or at least UUIDs or something of people in each photo I almost typed another bullet along the lines of "the top 10 most-likely features identified in the photo", like if it's a photo of a menu or a tower or whatever, then "menu" / "tower", but, it's probably encoded as some kind of embedding in some space like word2vec or something less ancient, and it wouldn't even really be that useful for them to give out the raw embedded through the API, would it? Maybe the last one (faces/people) isn't even possible, if they don't reify found people into some actual tag or something, maybe you just have to search by person and gphotos just shows you the photos with embeddings less than some cutoff cosine distance from that person's embedding.
gapeslape 2y ago
looks beautiful, great execution! do you mind sharing which fronted tools you used?
- gabigrin 2y ago
  Thank you! The main website (https://www.myphotos.site https://www.myphotos.site) was built my co-founder Or using Webflow. He's a real pro when it comes to websites - see more of his work here https://gambit.design/ https://gambit.design/ The user galleries and the editor dashboard are built using Next.js, Typescript, Tailwind, and Vercel. For the masonry, we first tried a few libraries (such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-masonry-css https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-masonry-css) but ended up writing our own because all the libraries we tried didn't handle proper column-height distribution. Anything else you're curious about?
icemelt8 2y ago
such a cute idea! But in this social media age, does anyone actually visit a website?
magic_hamster 2y ago
Awesome project, good luck!

195 points by gabigrin 2y ago

TomK32 2y ago

Reminds me of one of my earliest Ruby on Rails apps, some 14 years ago: Using the flickr api, the whole app white-labelled for custom domains etc... never got any traction.

mtmail 2y ago

Great website and the pricing makes sense. Some links still go to gphotos.site (automatic redirected). I tried so see how easy the iframe feature is, or rather if a non-technical person would understand the documentation. But the guides seem to be mostly AI generated SEO. Quickly the good impression of personal photos from genuine authors of the website turned into gen-AI slob https://www.myphotos.site/platforms/wordpress https://www.myphotos.site/platforms/wordpress

gabigrin 2y ago
Thanks! Re: links, will fix it. That was the original domain but Google didn't approve it, and we can totally understand why. Embed - it is a feature we pushed yesterday so still no proper documentation on that. It's as simple as importing images -> clicking on an "embed" button and grabbing the iframe code. Requires some technical understanding. We might improve to be platform-specific (Webflow, Wix) if there's a real need. And as for the guides you're seeing are complete gen-AI slob, I agree. Not something we're that proud of, but mostly for SEO to be able to acquire users at a reasonable price. We're running ads campaigns but with our low pricing, it'll be really hard to be profitable so SEO is one way.
- have_faith 2y ago
  I work on landing pages occasionally that have to account for SEO so can definitely sympathise with the uphill battle here. Like the OP, I was immediately put off of the "brand" when I saw the flood of AI stuff. It's like seeing how the sausage is made. I think there's an extra level of trust that needs building from a branding perspective because of how personal it feels to hand over personal images to someone to host for you, even if they become public anyway. It's interesting to see how people react to this sort of thing as it's very new. Good luck!
  - orlevco 2y ago
    Co-founder of MyPhotos here, You're right about trust being important. We're working hard to show that we're real people with good intentions. I actually didn't consider that using AI to generate some blogposts (that aren't the main content of the site) would have negative impact on how people perceive the product. So thanks, we appreciate the feedback and will take it into account moving forward.
    - wrycoder 2y ago
      The problem for me is not the SEO, but the vast AI blather, which is virtually content-free. You need a complete rewrite by an experienced human. After reading and reading, all I found was subjective comments about how great all the features are, without any information about the features themselves. What is your relation to Google? Can photos only come into your site from Google?
    - aziaziazi 2y ago
      > I actually didn't consider that using AI to generate some blogposts (that aren't the main content of the site) would have negative impact on how people perceive the product. As a cofounder you already know your product. I don’t, and one quick and easy way to discover is crawling your site (testing your product comes second as I need a bit of confidence before sharing my google credentials). Bad copyrighting (ai gen or not) depict one interest of having more customer while not much interest in sharing useful information on the subject. I don’t know about your motives so I can only trust you "are real people with good intention" and wish you good luck, but as an anonymous visitor I surely would have passed my way. If the guide posts aren’t mean for humans but the robots, maybe hide the link in a SEO friendly way? 10px off screen or z-indexed bellow another block for exemple. Also a header disclaimer would be very appreciated: "Content for SEO, back home"
dinosaurbone 2y ago
I would be concerned that it also flies a bit too close to the sun with the gen AI photos; if one of the primary markets is creatives who are trying to showcase their (non-AI) photos, it doesn't inspire confidence to see the company they're entrusting with that task to seemingly disregard the field they're in.
cryptozeus 2y ago
Agree ! Please remove those tacky ai stock photos !

darubramha 2y ago

Looks awesome, and will help quick galleries to be created. I wanted to build something similar, but at that time photos did not expose APIs to get list of photos. What was your work around? Or have they opened up the APIs now?

Alifatisk 2y ago
Curious about this aswell
mxuribe 2y ago
I'm not affiliated with this effort, but would the following google api suffice? https://developers.google.com/photos https://developers.google.com/photos
gabigrin 2y ago
Thanks! We're using the Google Picker API - https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/reference/rest https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/reference/rest You create a picker "session" which is a link where the user can select images from Google's side. Then you poll the session and once the user is done, you can get access to the media items (imgs and videos) that the user selected. At first, we wanted to auto-sync galleries and were bummed by the way this API works, but tbh it ended up being more private and secure for the user (no auto-syncing that embarrassing picture that shouldn't be online) and helped us avoid implementing a picker on our end.
- gnaman 2y ago
  How long is the session active for? Do you store these photos on your servers?
  - gabigrin 2y ago
    The session is active for couple of hours IIRC. Once the user is done with the selection we upload the images to our servers (Supabase storage) and delete the GPhotos session.

sigmar 2y ago

probably entirely google's fault, but I can't seem to pick a folder when I'm brought to the google photos search box. it only finds individual photos

gabigrin 2y ago
It's far from ideal but if you search for an album, you can quickly select all of it. Here's a video of Or, my co-founder showing that - https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=LQu8fJBDflVR11Rs&t=38 https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=LQu8fJBDflVR11Rs&t=38 (links to the exact second)

croisillon 2y ago

as someone who has been involved in gallery making in the past, i love it

orlevco 2y ago
That's cool to hear! Was there anything specific that sucked about how you had to do it then? We'd love to hear more to understand what problems we could solve better.
- croisillon 2y ago
  i think my main problem was the balance between overengineering (like the possibility to have white borders and shit) and making it user-friendly
  - gabigrin 2y ago
    sounds relatable :D

ddtaylor 2y ago

I appreciate the presentation and simplicity. You did a good job of presenting it.

yapyap 2y ago

the website itself looks very Template-y, now if that’s not of concern just ignore I said anything but that’s always what comes to mind when I visit a new website, like anecdotally I also hate it when a website has gone the whole extra mile to customize their website and then you check out and see the monotonous, bland things that are the stripe checkout buttons & page. Don’t get me wrong, I get why from a backend perspective, totally. It’s just takes you out of the whole immersion in the website (design)

gabigrin 2y ago
The "give users full control" vs. "help the user reach a fine result" tension is real. Our take on that is allowing pro-users who want full control to embed their gallery in their website. We can't nor want to compete with full-blown website builders on customization features.

cj 2y ago

Awesome nice work! Does this work for video? I recently digitized about 80 home videos from 30-40 years ago. Each of the 80 videos is 2 hours of 5-10 minute recordings from the olden days when turning "record" on and off didn't automatically create a new video file. I've been wondering the best way to post-edit and share them with other people in my family.

orlevco 2y ago
Co-founder of MyPhotos here, First of all - thanks! Re: Videos - we currently don't support them but might add that capability in the future. Videos complicate things both in terms of the product and because they're much more expensive to store, so they'll complicate the unit economics. Regardless - online video storage is currently very expensive. The leading platforms are Vimeo and Wistia, so you might consider them for now. About editing - what are you looking to do? I'll try to point you in the right direction. Or
- atonse 2y ago
  Check out Cloudflare Stream and see if their prices might work.
  - gabigrin 2y ago
    Will do! thank you
  - tricked 2y ago
    you can also store the videos on plain r2 you just have to do a bit more manual work but its cheaper
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  You could get uncloudy and go with a provider with unmetered bandwidth and then use their storage slabs which present as block devices up to 10TB. So you could string together a PV/VG with eight 10TB slabs on a single server. I’d suspect the storage cost of this approach might even be similar or less than AWS glacier storage.. BuyVM has been around for a long time and very stable and excellent reputation. You’ll find that your costs would be much lower if you’d “uncloud” (I’m obviously assuming that you are using AWS or a cloud, but maybe not!) https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/ https://buyvm.net/block-storage-slabs/

almog 2y ago

I often use Photos album link sharing option. Have never tried to embed in in an existing page, is that the problem it is solving at the moment (and relocating the images though I am not sure what that entails in terms of usage rights)? I must have missed something otherwise.

orlevco 2y ago
For simply sharing specific photos - GPhotos' native share feature is great. Our product is for people who are looking for a more advanced publishing option. Something like a website or portfolio, but super quick and easy to create. Does that make sense?

a012 2y ago

If user delete photos on Google side, are they also removed from your service? And also what's the retention of user data on your service once I cancel my account?

gabigrin 2y ago
No, the Google Photos integration is uni-directional. We only get access to images users pick in the import phase. Removing images from MyPhotos is done from the platform itself. Regarding retention - we'll delete all your data if you wish to cancel your account.

rishikeshs 2y ago

Hi great idea! I was also trying to build something similar for photographers! But who are your target audience? How is this different from sharing a public album link?

dirkc 2y ago

Well done launching! I had a quick look at the example site linked in the footer and I like it. I've spent way too much time messing around with layouts for image galleries with different aspect ratio photos. Looks like you're using a masonry layout. Any thoughts on masonry vs something like flickr's layout?

jazzyjackson 2y ago

Sorry to be critical but $15/m before allowing custom domain is not a good value IMO, that's right up there with squarespace and they'll register the domain for me at that price This is very much a solution to a problem I have, too, one that was taken care of by Google Business sites before they threw it in the bin https://support.google.com/business/answer/https://support.google.com/business/answer/14368911?hl=en?hl=en https://support.google.com/business/answer/https://support.g...

gabigrin 2y ago
That's a valid point. We're still experimenting with pricing and this is great feeback

mohammedhdotio 2y ago

[flagged]

yoble 2y ago

My mom is an avid traveler who takes a ton of photos and puts them on albums she then shares with the family, and a while ago she was asking if I had a solution so she could have a website where all her albums are listed. She wanted to not have to share a new link each time, and have people easily look up older ones. I didn't have any easy solution and this looks promising, congrats! A few dealbreaker things I can share: - she has lots of albums already on gphoto. She'd need to easily import them. - she makes heavy use of the map and text blocks you can add in gphoto albums, which makes each album a kind of travel diary. I don't get the sense these are supported in your product yet, these would be required for her. - she doesn't have a ton of videos but sometimes she does have a few. - I'd have some concerns about the longevity of your product - if she invests time into it she wants to be able to look back at the albums in 10-20 years time. Having a convenient way to export the albums would be reassuring to me. - I think she has a few 1000s photos in those albums, so your highest tier would be too low for her, if there was a way to buy storage that might suit her usage better (though she has a hobbyist budget). It might be technically difficult and you rejected that path already, but I'm thinking an ideal way for her would be to keep editing her albums in gphotos and sync them to your site, which would take care of the longevity concerns and allow her to keep using the interface she knows (if you linked directly to the pics/vids on google server that would eliminate the cost of storing pictures for you, but I assume that's impossible or prohibited by google's tos). Anyway, just sharing my use case in case that's useful but congrats on launching and on the good looking product!

tyrust 2y ago
> she could have a website where all her albums are listed. She wanted to not have to share a new link each time, and have people easily look up older ones. Would a static site with a list of links to Google Photos albums work? I've done this with my family. If so, there are ample static website providers out there.
orlevco 2y ago
First of all, your mom sounds awesome. Second, thanks for the detailed thoughts! Easy import of existing albums - We have that! find the album on GPhotos, select all and import. Check out how quick it is here: https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=Wk1wtDoPO5_DYWEV https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=Wk1wtDoPO5_DYWEV Map and text blocks - These are currently not supported, but we're still considering different use cases and will add features to match the ones we focus on soon. Videos - These are currently not supported but might be added soon. They pose some storage and pricing issues but we'll try to solve that. Again depending on the use case we end up pursuing Longevity - This is a legitimate concern. Obviously we're hoping that this product keeps growing and plan to maintain it. Regardless - The north star of this product is to be fast and easy to set up. So we hope that the time investment won't be that big anyhow. Pricing and Storage - We've just launched so the pricing plans will definitely change over time. We'll take that into account. Syncing albums - Seamlessly syncing albums to online galleries was our dream. Unfortunately Google's API doesn't support that (for obvious security and privacy concerns). We'd love for your mom to give our product a try and will be happy to give her a generous period of free usage of the premium plan for some of her feedback. If you're interested, please reach out at hey@myphotos.site. Thanks again! Or

welder 2y ago

Reminds me of a 13 year old GitHub project back when Google Photos was called Picasa: https://github.com/alanhamlett/jQuery-Picasa-Gallery https://github.com/alanhamlett/jQuery-Picasa-Gallery

gabigrin 2y ago
That's cool! thanks for sharing

dc_rog 2y ago

Super cool. Typo here “Show your art, keep friends up-to-date or share family photos with lode ones.”

mrccc 2y ago

Have you looked into row-based presentation of the images? I usually feel like pages with row-based image grids have a higher-quality look to them. See e.g. [1] and [2] for more info and [3] for an implementation. [1]: https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 [2]: https://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/google-plus-layout-find-best-breaks.html https://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/google-plus-layout-find-be... [3]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-photo-gallery https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-photo-gallery

orlevco 2y ago
Super interesting. Thanks for the detailed thoughts and link. The thinking behind the vertical masonry grid is that by always having semi-visible pictures in view it draws the eyes down to keep scrolling. If that makes sense. Will definitely check out the links and consider further. Or
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podviaznikov 2y ago

very cool. last year I made similar for Apple Photos(but it's on pause now). https://public.photos https://public.photos

orlevco 2y ago
That's super cool Anton! Your way of uploading the albums is really neat. Haven't thought about that. Do you mind sharing more? How did that work out for you? Did you encounter any technical issues with working with Apple's app? Why did you end up pausing the project? Would love to hear from you, Or
- podviaznikov 2y ago
  I have few other projects like that and this one is one of the least popular. So I paused it. Also on top of that dealing with photos and videos are not cheap and would be harder for me to scale things. Basically it was a fun little experiment.
ggandhi 2y ago
This is super cool, just like the www.myphotos.site. Just need a nice UI and options to share/hide album.

october-freedom 2y ago

boycott, divest, sanction

cryptozeus 2y ago

Good execution but why can’t someone just upload the pics on blog or Wordpress and do the same ?

orlevco 2y ago
This is simply much faster and easier than any other way. Wordpress and other blog sites require quite a lot of effort and technical knowledge. We aim to democratize photo sharing and let anyone do it quickly and effortlessly. Does that make sense?

haarts 2y ago

The one feature I'm always missing is password protection; I don't want everyone to see my travel pictures.

gabigrin 2y ago
Great feedback! Not just great, but 100% made sense to go ahead and ship it real quick. It's live! https://youtu.be/qhHHPHDnMTc https://youtu.be/qhHHPHDnMTc (and server-side secure!)
- haarts 2y ago
  Holy hell, that was fast! I'm gonna spread this far and wide.

spike021 2y ago

Something to consider, adobe Lightroom has a feature coupled with adobe portfolio (iirc that's the name of the product) where if you use Lightroom you can turn albums into sites. Similar idea on paper. May be useful to compare how theirs works since that could be a competitor of sorts.

krat0sprakhar 2y ago

Really good execution! I was definitely looking for something like this - so great job in working on a real problem. I think the pricing might be a bit tricky. The free plan allows 50 photos whereas the free plan on Flickr allows 1000 photos (and no limit on albums IIRC). Can you elaborate a bit on how you plan to differentiate?

orlevco 2y ago
Thank you! Pricing is indeed something we're still trying to figure out. Currently we see differentiation as a combination of simplicity and elegance/visual quality. Meaning platforms like Flicker are too cluttered and outdated in terms of how galleries look. But in this too we still have a lot to learn and figure out.

ibzsy 2y ago

really cool

philsnow 2y ago

One of the things I would want included is any and all metadata / tags that Google Photos adds to photos. For instance: - inferred/corrected geotags - inferred/corrected time of day - names or at least UUIDs or something of people in each photo I almost typed another bullet along the lines of "the top 10 most-likely features identified in the photo", like if it's a photo of a menu or a tower or whatever, then "menu" / "tower", but, it's probably encoded as some kind of embedding in some space like word2vec or something less ancient, and it wouldn't even really be that useful for them to give out the raw embedded through the API, would it? Maybe the last one (faces/people) isn't even possible, if they don't reify found people into some actual tag or something, maybe you just have to search by person and gphotos just shows you the photos with embeddings less than some cutoff cosine distance from that person's embedding.

gapeslape 2y ago

looks beautiful, great execution! do you mind sharing which fronted tools you used?

gabigrin 2y ago
Thank you! The main website (https://www.myphotos.site https://www.myphotos.site) was built my co-founder Or using Webflow. He's a real pro when it comes to websites - see more of his work here https://gambit.design/ https://gambit.design/ The user galleries and the editor dashboard are built using Next.js, Typescript, Tailwind, and Vercel. For the masonry, we first tried a few libraries (such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-masonry-css https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-masonry-css) but ended up writing our own because all the libraries we tried didn't handle proper column-height distribution. Anything else you're curious about?

icemelt8 2y ago

such a cute idea! But in this social media age, does anyone actually visit a website?

magic_hamster 2y ago

Awesome project, good luck!