5 ms·

Photo uploading is broken

61 points by ananddass 14y ago

ananddass 14y ago
To be clear: Filepicker.io isn't broken.
- brettcvz 14y ago
  I love that we have to clarify this on days like today
- BryanB55 14y ago
  When I read the headline the first thing I thought was "uh oh" ... We're building something with filepicker.io at the moment and I thought the service was down.
  - ananddass 14y ago
    Yeh. Totally my bad. should have been more careful with the phrasing. We are not down. All is well :-)
haxplorer 14y ago
I've been through this precise problem both from a developer's as well as a consumer's standpoint. As a developer, when we built Unifyphotos(http://export.goyaka.com/ http://export.goyaka.com/) to transfer photos from flickr to facebook, and got some traffic peaks, it was lot of work to scale up the download_from_flickr -> scale_photos -> upload_to_Facebook process, and we had 6 machines just doing this. Wish Filepicker.io was there back then. We could just have worried about the features and not the infrastructure. Even better, if Facebook used Filepicker, there would have been no need for a service to migrate those photos. From a consumer side, I've often had to download my Facebook profile pic and upload as profile pic on sites like trello, basecamp, etc. If only they used Filepicker.io...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
bcardarella 14y ago
You know what is really broken? The "X is broken" record.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  "You know what's broken? Things being broken."
pyrotechnick 14y ago
"Photos are a b*tch: Photo uploading is broken" If you're going to use profanities, then please, at least use profanities. "In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself." - Tim Robbins
- bcardarella 14y ago
  excuse me but these kids are clearly rockstar ninjas and they have earned the right to speak as they choose!
  - pyrotechnick 14y ago
    "Brogrammers" more likely.
    - emmett 14y ago
      These kind of ad-hominem comments add nothing to the conversation. Please don't make them on HN.
      - pyrotechnick 14y ago
        http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=emmett http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=emmett
        emmett 14y ago
        Why are you posting a link to my comments? Don't be a dick.
        bcardarella 14y ago
        These kind of ad-hominem comments add nothing to the conversation. Please don't make them on HN.
jc4p 14y ago
I just want to add in my experience in this field and using Filepicker.io as a service: We spent the better part of two weeks introducing inline images into our social network's stream which worked by the user copy-pasting a URL to a youtube video/vimeo video/imgur gallery page/imgur photo page/direct link to any image mimetype into their status update box and posting it. If they did this, some javascript would (almost) magically show a preview of the attached media and show them that it would be displayed inline. We thought it was awesome and would be the greatest thing ever. No one used it. Not only that, our biggest assumption was wrong: Our users didn't know how to upload photos from their computers onto imgur or another photo upload service, if they were told they could copy/paste the URL to an image and have it show up. Luckily, the weekend after we released this feature Filepicker was announced and we jumped on it right away, I set up a new version of inline images on our site using Filepicker and our previous method combined in less than 2 days, and it was live that Monday, and guess what? While most people still don't add images on our site, the usage rate has almost gone up by 10x.
- bunkat 14y ago
  BidKat actually used a very similar model in our MVP - users would upload images to imgur and then copy and paste the link to add the image to their auction. We had the same results, nobody had any idea how to use it or even what we were talking about. We looked at Filepicker.io but just couldn't justify the cost. I also had a hard time putting a core part of our business in the hands of somebody else. We see it too often where you take a hard dependency like this and then the service either goes down or worse, gets acqui-hired. We now just use a simple link the user clicks on to add an image from their computer which then gets processed and uploaded to S3. Took me about 1/2 a day to code up and my monthly cost is about $1.50. I admit it isn't fancy. We don't have drag and drop, you can't add images from Dropbox or Facebook directly, but it works for us and our customers.
  - jc4p 14y ago
    For us the cost is definitely worth it. We're a Fitness social network and there are a lot of groups on the site dedicated to talking about meals, you have no idea how many people use the Filepicker functionality to cross-post instagram pictures of their food.
lyime 14y ago
Thanks for the Picplum (https://www.picplum.com https://www.picplum.com) shout-out guys. We had specific requirements around custom UI for using Filepicker. We worked with their team to get it built and integrated in less than a week. Love the support!
lobster45 14y ago
Imgur is beyond simple. http://imgur.com/ http://imgur.com/ Drag and drop or control + V is all you need
- jc4p 14y ago
  Check out my other comment on this thread, but even though you and I think it's incredibly simple almost no one out of my company's (relatively nerdy) target audience could figure it out.
  - jseliger 14y ago
    Whenever people on HN and elsewhere say "X is really simple" and someone rebuts them, I like to link to this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-... about how 90% of people apparently don't know how to use ctrl / command-f to find words. There is no such thing as too simple.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I expect that one of the disruptions here will be dropbox. Photo sharing is pretty seamless and even those 'on my machine' photos are pretty easy to export with existing local UX.
- ananddass 14y ago
  Sure. Dropbox is doing an awesome job there. But from the developer perspective, he will still have to maintain multiple integrations into FB, Dropbox etc. If the developer treats dropbox as a local drive folder then he will still have to support things like progress bars, drag and drops etc for local uploads. So the pain will still remain.
  - jseliger 14y ago
    Great comment. I can say, anecdotally, that I send photos to friends / family using Dropbox all the time. Most of them are slightly confused by the idea at first, but when the invite e-mail shows up most of them click it and sign up (Dropbox also cleverly incents me to do this by offering more space for referrals). Dropbox, however, started wanting to copy ALL photos from my cameras and/or Pictures folder to it, which made me bristle because I don't want all my photos, and especially the NSFW ones, on Dropbox. >But from the developer perspective, he will still have to maintain multiple integrations into FB, Dropbox etc. Yeah. Especially because I'm averse to FB, but Joe down the street loves it, and Jane mostly uses Picasa, and so on.
mickeyben 14y ago
Totally agree with this. At letitcast, we're dealing with large video uploads (up to 500Mo), image uploads and resumes (pdf). Giving to our users a nice experience was very time consuming. We had the following requirement for the client side uploader: iE7 support (we have worldwide inexperienced users), progressbar, multiple file chooser, client side file type detection (server side too). We ended up using swfupload + a lot of js. It mostly work but we're not completely satisfied. Last time we checked, there was at least two popular uploaders on Github but both of them are HTML5-only (vs flash based) and didn't offered the same experience in every browser. We were first uploading directly to the Rails backend but it eventually killed our frontends. We experimented with sinatra async, eventmachine and node.js and endend up using node to handle file uploads, validations, image processing, S3 storage and video encoding (via zencoder). This was our first app with node and in less than a week we had our app in production, handling hundreds of upload/day. We also had a few suprises with imagemagick causing 100% CPU load (https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=fr&gs_nf=1&tok=unKi0Zf1WCyMYvwHN3PDOA&pq=imagemagick%20hangs%20convert&cp=15&gs_id=27&xhr=t&q=imagemagick+100+cpu&pf=p&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&sclient=psy-ab&oq=imagemagick+100&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=eb6634e6a39aad58&ion=1&biw=1280&bih=552 https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&so...). I'm pretty sure I forgot a lot of issues we ran into. We learned a lot along the way but it's nice to see some people are trying to tackle this issue. FYI the guys at transloadit also work on this.
grueful 14y ago
All I want for Photos-Are-Broken Christmas is a plugin to take a Dropbox folder and display a nicely formatted gallery on a Wordpress blog. It also wouldn't hurt if Dropbox would stop trying to wrap image links in a gallery page. Anyway, here's a picture of a robot's shadow on Mars. https://photos-3.dropbox.com/thumb/AADVCsDpEacRaKHkyoPhQUU86CojbB5NgdmUcYCRzmJDmw/57442792/jpeg/2048x1536/2/1347336000/0/2/robots_on_mars.jpg/84omoi1ExerNpM9C6hanAGbYitlDpegFqXbIupuhHh8 https://photos-3.dropbox.com/thumb/AADVCsDpEacRaKHkyoPhQUU86... Uploading was trivial. Sharing was a bit harder because they made it harder. Anyone want to make and sell that Wordpress plugin? It would make sharing trivial for a broad audience with a habit of paying for useful plugins.
- jmathai 14y ago
  You might be interested in OpenPhoto which adds a handful of layers on top of services like Dropbox and S3. Here's an example of displaying photos from Dropbox (in this example it's S3). http://current.openphoto.me/photos/list http://current.openphoto.me/photos/list Disclaimer: I'm a lead dev on the project https://github.com/photo/frontend https://github.com/photo/frontend
losvedir 14y ago
Oh, how timely! My startup has been pondering whether to incorporate filepicker.io after someone recommended it to us. Photos are extremely important for our site, but for now we've just been using a basic multipart form upload which has been a pain. I've looked through the docs briefly, but couldn't find exactly this question answered: Can we force our users to crop their photos to a certain dimension with filepicker.io? I played with the Aviary demo and was able to crop, but I couldn't tell if there was a way for the implementor to specify and lock the dimensions. Currently we have users upload their raw photo, then send them to a cropping page, and then save that, but if we could replace it all in one go with this tool that would be amazing! Then, if I'm reading it correctly, we're given a URL and have four hours to grab the image from you guys? Lastly, and I feel a little dirty for asking, but I've been working on this since "what's the worst that can happen?": are any sort of discounts you can offer for a fellow HN user? We're in TechStars Boston and there's a lot of cross-talk among the startups about nifty tools and services to use, so I can assure you we'd promote filepicker.io if it's as amazing and convenient as it seems!
batista 14y ago
>Imagine all the awesome applications possible if you had access to these photos easily. I cannot. Please, do tell us some of those "awesome applications" if we had access to several billion photos easily: >One of my favourite services that does more with all these photos is Picplum. Picplum allows you to print and send your photo prints to loved ones. Awesome... is probably not the right word.
itmag 14y ago
I am wondering if you did any testing to determine your pricing? IIRC, patio11 recommends not putting a price for the Enterprise option.
oliwarner 14y ago
"You're doing thing wrong!" says person selling new method for doing things. I think it's slightly perverse that no browser has attempted to offer a method for uploading reduced-size photos. I know it's a new set of patents to trample over but this is a problem that has existed for years that has only been able to use messy plugins to workaround. Edit: For clarity I'm talking about extending the <file type="input" /> tag to include extra attributes for specifying the maximum dimensions of an image. To me this isn't any weirder than limiting mime-type (which you can through the accept attribute).
ajtaylor 14y ago
After some more digging, I suspect we'll be giving filepicker a try at $work. The value add looks very compelling, especially being able to do things like crop & resize. Our users have been asking for image resize functionality for years, but we've never had the time or priority to do it ourselves. $600/yr for the pro plan is about one day's developer salary. Rather a no-brainer in my opinion.

61 points by ananddass 14y ago

ananddass 14y ago

To be clear: Filepicker.io isn't broken.

brettcvz 14y ago
I love that we have to clarify this on days like today
BryanB55 14y ago
When I read the headline the first thing I thought was "uh oh" ... We're building something with filepicker.io at the moment and I thought the service was down.
- ananddass 14y ago
  Yeh. Totally my bad. should have been more careful with the phrasing. We are not down. All is well :-)

haxplorer 14y ago

I've been through this precise problem both from a developer's as well as a consumer's standpoint. As a developer, when we built Unifyphotos(http://export.goyaka.com/ http://export.goyaka.com/) to transfer photos from flickr to facebook, and got some traffic peaks, it was lot of work to scale up the download_from_flickr -> scale_photos -> upload_to_Facebook process, and we had 6 machines just doing this. Wish Filepicker.io was there back then. We could just have worried about the features and not the infrastructure. Even better, if Facebook used Filepicker, there would have been no need for a service to migrate those photos. From a consumer side, I've often had to download my Facebook profile pic and upload as profile pic on sites like trello, basecamp, etc. If only they used Filepicker.io...

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

bcardarella 14y ago

You know what is really broken? The "X is broken" record.

sliverstorm 14y ago
"You know what's broken? Things being broken."

pyrotechnick 14y ago

"Photos are a b*tch: Photo uploading is broken" If you're going to use profanities, then please, at least use profanities. "In a free society the biggest danger is that you're afraid to the point where you censor yourself." - Tim Robbins

bcardarella 14y ago
excuse me but these kids are clearly rockstar ninjas and they have earned the right to speak as they choose!
- pyrotechnick 14y ago
  "Brogrammers" more likely.
  - emmett 14y ago
    These kind of ad-hominem comments add nothing to the conversation. Please don't make them on HN.
    - pyrotechnick 14y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=emmett http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=emmett
      - emmett 14y ago
        Why are you posting a link to my comments? Don't be a dick.
        bcardarella 14y ago
        These kind of ad-hominem comments add nothing to the conversation. Please don't make them on HN.

jc4p 14y ago

I just want to add in my experience in this field and using Filepicker.io as a service: We spent the better part of two weeks introducing inline images into our social network's stream which worked by the user copy-pasting a URL to a youtube video/vimeo video/imgur gallery page/imgur photo page/direct link to any image mimetype into their status update box and posting it. If they did this, some javascript would (almost) magically show a preview of the attached media and show them that it would be displayed inline. We thought it was awesome and would be the greatest thing ever. No one used it. Not only that, our biggest assumption was wrong: Our users didn't know how to upload photos from their computers onto imgur or another photo upload service, if they were told they could copy/paste the URL to an image and have it show up. Luckily, the weekend after we released this feature Filepicker was announced and we jumped on it right away, I set up a new version of inline images on our site using Filepicker and our previous method combined in less than 2 days, and it was live that Monday, and guess what? While most people still don't add images on our site, the usage rate has almost gone up by 10x.

bunkat 14y ago
BidKat actually used a very similar model in our MVP - users would upload images to imgur and then copy and paste the link to add the image to their auction. We had the same results, nobody had any idea how to use it or even what we were talking about. We looked at Filepicker.io but just couldn't justify the cost. I also had a hard time putting a core part of our business in the hands of somebody else. We see it too often where you take a hard dependency like this and then the service either goes down or worse, gets acqui-hired. We now just use a simple link the user clicks on to add an image from their computer which then gets processed and uploaded to S3. Took me about 1/2 a day to code up and my monthly cost is about $1.50. I admit it isn't fancy. We don't have drag and drop, you can't add images from Dropbox or Facebook directly, but it works for us and our customers.
- jc4p 14y ago
  For us the cost is definitely worth it. We're a Fitness social network and there are a lot of groups on the site dedicated to talking about meals, you have no idea how many people use the Filepicker functionality to cross-post instagram pictures of their food.

lyime 14y ago

Thanks for the Picplum (https://www.picplum.com https://www.picplum.com) shout-out guys. We had specific requirements around custom UI for using Filepicker. We worked with their team to get it built and integrated in less than a week. Love the support!

lobster45 14y ago

Imgur is beyond simple. http://imgur.com/ http://imgur.com/ Drag and drop or control + V is all you need

jc4p 14y ago
Check out my other comment on this thread, but even though you and I think it's incredibly simple almost no one out of my company's (relatively nerdy) target audience could figure it out.
- jseliger 14y ago
  Whenever people on HN and elsewhere say "X is really simple" and someone rebuts them, I like to link to this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-... about how 90% of people apparently don't know how to use ctrl / command-f to find words. There is no such thing as too simple.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I expect that one of the disruptions here will be dropbox. Photo sharing is pretty seamless and even those 'on my machine' photos are pretty easy to export with existing local UX.

ananddass 14y ago
Sure. Dropbox is doing an awesome job there. But from the developer perspective, he will still have to maintain multiple integrations into FB, Dropbox etc. If the developer treats dropbox as a local drive folder then he will still have to support things like progress bars, drag and drops etc for local uploads. So the pain will still remain.
- jseliger 14y ago
  Great comment. I can say, anecdotally, that I send photos to friends / family using Dropbox all the time. Most of them are slightly confused by the idea at first, but when the invite e-mail shows up most of them click it and sign up (Dropbox also cleverly incents me to do this by offering more space for referrals). Dropbox, however, started wanting to copy ALL photos from my cameras and/or Pictures folder to it, which made me bristle because I don't want all my photos, and especially the NSFW ones, on Dropbox. >But from the developer perspective, he will still have to maintain multiple integrations into FB, Dropbox etc. Yeah. Especially because I'm averse to FB, but Joe down the street loves it, and Jane mostly uses Picasa, and so on.

mickeyben 14y ago

Totally agree with this. At letitcast, we're dealing with large video uploads (up to 500Mo), image uploads and resumes (pdf). Giving to our users a nice experience was very time consuming. We had the following requirement for the client side uploader: iE7 support (we have worldwide inexperienced users), progressbar, multiple file chooser, client side file type detection (server side too). We ended up using swfupload + a lot of js. It mostly work but we're not completely satisfied. Last time we checked, there was at least two popular uploaders on Github but both of them are HTML5-only (vs flash based) and didn't offered the same experience in every browser. We were first uploading directly to the Rails backend but it eventually killed our frontends. We experimented with sinatra async, eventmachine and node.js and endend up using node to handle file uploads, validations, image processing, S3 storage and video encoding (via zencoder). This was our first app with node and in less than a week we had our app in production, handling hundreds of upload/day. We also had a few suprises with imagemagick causing 100% CPU load (https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=fr&gs_nf=1&tok=unKi0Zf1WCyMYvwHN3PDOA&pq=imagemagick%20hangs%20convert&cp=15&gs_id=27&xhr=t&q=imagemagick+100+cpu&pf=p&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&sclient=psy-ab&oq=imagemagick+100&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=eb6634e6a39aad58&ion=1&biw=1280&bih=552 https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C1CHFX_frFR491FR491&so...). I'm pretty sure I forgot a lot of issues we ran into. We learned a lot along the way but it's nice to see some people are trying to tackle this issue. FYI the guys at transloadit also work on this.

grueful 14y ago

All I want for Photos-Are-Broken Christmas is a plugin to take a Dropbox folder and display a nicely formatted gallery on a Wordpress blog. It also wouldn't hurt if Dropbox would stop trying to wrap image links in a gallery page. Anyway, here's a picture of a robot's shadow on Mars. https://photos-3.dropbox.com/thumb/AADVCsDpEacRaKHkyoPhQUU86CojbB5NgdmUcYCRzmJDmw/57442792/jpeg/2048x1536/2/1347336000/0/2/robots_on_mars.jpg/84omoi1ExerNpM9C6hanAGbYitlDpegFqXbIupuhHh8 https://photos-3.dropbox.com/thumb/AADVCsDpEacRaKHkyoPhQUU86... Uploading was trivial. Sharing was a bit harder because they made it harder. Anyone want to make and sell that Wordpress plugin? It would make sharing trivial for a broad audience with a habit of paying for useful plugins.

jmathai 14y ago
You might be interested in OpenPhoto which adds a handful of layers on top of services like Dropbox and S3. Here's an example of displaying photos from Dropbox (in this example it's S3). http://current.openphoto.me/photos/list http://current.openphoto.me/photos/list Disclaimer: I'm a lead dev on the project https://github.com/photo/frontend https://github.com/photo/frontend

losvedir 14y ago

Oh, how timely! My startup has been pondering whether to incorporate filepicker.io after someone recommended it to us. Photos are extremely important for our site, but for now we've just been using a basic multipart form upload which has been a pain. I've looked through the docs briefly, but couldn't find exactly this question answered: Can we force our users to crop their photos to a certain dimension with filepicker.io? I played with the Aviary demo and was able to crop, but I couldn't tell if there was a way for the implementor to specify and lock the dimensions. Currently we have users upload their raw photo, then send them to a cropping page, and then save that, but if we could replace it all in one go with this tool that would be amazing! Then, if I'm reading it correctly, we're given a URL and have four hours to grab the image from you guys? Lastly, and I feel a little dirty for asking, but I've been working on this since "what's the worst that can happen?": are any sort of discounts you can offer for a fellow HN user? We're in TechStars Boston and there's a lot of cross-talk among the startups about nifty tools and services to use, so I can assure you we'd promote filepicker.io if it's as amazing and convenient as it seems!

batista 14y ago

>Imagine all the awesome applications possible if you had access to these photos easily. I cannot. Please, do tell us some of those "awesome applications" if we had access to several billion photos easily: >One of my favourite services that does more with all these photos is Picplum. Picplum allows you to print and send your photo prints to loved ones. Awesome... is probably not the right word.

itmag 14y ago

I am wondering if you did any testing to determine your pricing? IIRC, patio11 recommends not putting a price for the Enterprise option.

oliwarner 14y ago

"You're doing thing wrong!" says person selling new method for doing things. I think it's slightly perverse that no browser has attempted to offer a method for uploading reduced-size photos. I know it's a new set of patents to trample over but this is a problem that has existed for years that has only been able to use messy plugins to workaround. Edit: For clarity I'm talking about extending the <file type="input" /> tag to include extra attributes for specifying the maximum dimensions of an image. To me this isn't any weirder than limiting mime-type (which you can through the accept attribute).

ajtaylor 14y ago

After some more digging, I suspect we'll be giving filepicker a try at $work. The value add looks very compelling, especially being able to do things like crop & resize. Our users have been asking for image resize functionality for years, but we've never had the time or priority to do it ourselves. $600/yr for the pro plan is about one day's developer salary. Rather a no-brainer in my opinion.