5 ms·

Divvyshot [YC W09]: Photo-sharing for groups

64 points by vlad 18y ago

aston 18y ago
A little YC easter egg: If you keep refreshing until you get to the little girl's birthday photos, you'll notice all of the names are of the YC principals + baby George. Nice touch.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
thepanister 18y ago
Congratulations. Looks very attractive! If you can find a way to help users "move"/import their stuff from their current service to yours, then it would be really great. Also if you consider adding service like printing or something...
mcxx 18y ago
Those hot girls on the photos will definitely boost sing-up rate.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- vaksel 18y ago
  to clear up any misunderstandings I'm sure he is talking about the girls on the beach and not the kids at the birthday party
simonista 18y ago
The design looks really nice. I already use drop box with friends to accomplish pretty much the same thing, and it wasn't immediately apparent what the added value would be to using Divvyshot. Also, the first time I went to the upload page I got a "unknown certificate. trust/don't trust" dialog which disrupted the otherwise excellent UX. Mac OS X 10.5.6, Safari 4 if that's relevant. Overall great work. I think this will be really appealing for people looking to share photos without any setup.
davincicode 18y ago
I am actually genuinely excited to use this There bringing something new(er) to photo sharing which is awesome
vaksel 18y ago
Props on using a quick sign up box. I would take out the "free" from the Alpha account, might turn away people who'll think you'll need to pay later.
- thepanister 18y ago
  read this at the bottom of the page: Hurry! Only 738 free alpha accounts available! After the first 1,000 accounts, we're going to charge for storage.
  - nopassrecover 18y ago
    And beat the free storage competitors?
cperciva 18y ago
Here's my 10 second review: I have no clue why I should want to use this instead of flickr. I'm sure there's some reason -- but whatever it is, you might want to point it out more clearly on the front page, because otherwise those 10 seconds are probably all you're going to get from most people.
- johndevor 18y ago
  I believe Divvyshot is largely for grouping high-res photos centered around events (multi person gatherings with more than one camera)... and I guess it isn't as clear as it should be. Any idea on how to convey that message more clearly?
  - nadim 18y ago
    Two quick and unfiltered thoughts: Host photos of actual high profile events (i.e. a conference, a concert) and link to this on the front page to show unregistered users what the site is capable of. Add a tagline to the divvyshot logo in the top left.
- cdr 18y ago
  Ditto. I spent 60 seconds trying to figure that out and left. The only advantage over flickr I can see is that it's free - but even that is apparently only for alpha.
- alabut 18y ago
  Honestly, I think it's a design issue. Interaction design, not visual design (the site's very pretty) because the answer to your question is right there on the home page, it's just nowhere near prominent enough to grab your attention in the 10 seconds you mentioned. "No account needed! It couldn't be easier! You can share photos with friends and family right now!" You can tell it's important because it's repeated again directly below, with a minor change in wording: " Share your photos NOW - No account needed! " That's actually huge, I'm guessing it's even the main feature that sold YC on accepting them (to me, "photo sharing made stupid simple" = "no account needed") especially considering that trend in recent YC startups like posterous. Actually, posterous is a great example, go look at their home page, the super prominent crossed out "make an account" line at the top of the page gets across the point really nicely.
Sam_Odio 18y ago
Hey guys, it's Sam (divvyshot's creator). The site's a piece of crap right now, but hopefully things will be better over the coming weeks. Release early and frequently, right? If you find any huge bugs email me: so / at / divvyshot / dot / com Features we've built and haven't yet launched include: - A Desktop client (PC & Mac) - Twitter, Flickr, & Facebook synchronization - Facebook application - An iPhone app (you can see real time what's happening at the event you're attending and push photos to the event from your phone) - Snipshot photo editing
- thepanister 18y ago
  Consider adding captcha on the signup, to prevent automation! Also, can users email their photos, even if they are not registered?
  - rantfoil 18y ago
    There are other ways to prevent automation (JS) -- captcha is like one of the most damaging ways of fighting it, and it will always lower your conversion rate significantly. When you're starting out, lower conversion is a death sentence. My take: solve problems like this when you have to, not before.
- jklubnik 18y ago
  Allow email addresses to contain a plus. It's something a lot of gmail users like to do.
  - Sam_Odio 18y ago
    Fixed, thanks for the heads up.
    - d0mine 18y ago
      `+` doesn't work in emails. TOS is scary.
  - cpach 18y ago
nopassrecover 18y ago
I'm a little confused - really great execution (!!) but I don't see the business sense. I'm not sure how this differentiates itself from other file hosting/photo sharing sites. For instance can you have private photos on Flickr? At the very least there are things like drop box as mentioned. What about people who tend to share photos through Facebook? Besides which, what is the monetisation strategy? Freemium? What features will be added? There must be some sense or it wouldn't have got YC investment - maybe the idea is to execute this so well that Google buys you you as I don't think they have a good photo sharing method yet and it would be a great way to expand?
arnorhs 18y ago
About the frontpage question: "You and your friends went to a party. where do you put the photos? Right here!" --- ehh wrong, personally I'd put my photos on facebook. I have an account there, my friends do as well, so I don't get it... sorry :S
- vlad 18y ago
  If you want your photos on Facebook, divvyshot is the best way to get them there, as well as the best way for Facebook users to receive them, but I'm not sure how much of the functionality is in beta/secret.
- pg 18y ago
  If a group of you wants to put all the photos you took at some event in one place, where do you put them?
  - RK 18y ago
    Dropbox?
  - wheels 18y ago
    Usually in a Flickr pool.
  - jupiter 18y ago
    Facebook. You can tag your friends and they will be notified. That's a huge advantage, because not only the tagged person comes to see but also her nosy friends.
    - pg 18y ago
      Sorry, I was unclear. By "one place" I meant one page, not one domain name.
  - kieranoneill 18y ago
    Facebook without a doubt. It's what everyone does, and while it's slightly broken because all the albums for one event aren't linked, it's not a huge problem. It's something that would be nice for Facebook to fix, but isn't major. At least that's my opinion as a user.
savrajsingh 18y ago
Divvyshot centers on events -- not albums by individual photographers. You can quickly post a few pics and get folks uploading their photos to the same event with almost no effort. Check out the immediate photo upload -- just drag and drop into your browser! And you can click to download a zipfile of all photos in an event, at full resolution. Think of it as a new spin on photo sharing, similar to how Posterous is a new spin on blogging.
- neilk 18y ago
  It's drag and drop from the finder to the "Mini Divvy" app. Then it does some sort of synchronization to everywhere that's registered interest in that "event". Not sure what the use cases are, and whether it justifies a whole other app, but it's an interesting spin on sharing. You don't just get notified of something, you just get the file.
uuilly 18y ago
Your branding is at odds w/ your mission statement. High res photos speaks to pro-sumers. Party pics speaks to grainy iphone shots.
- johndevor 18y ago
  Sure, party pictures are one thing, and facebook handles those quite well. I don't believe Divvyshot stands to take that market from facebook. That said, if you've ever travelled overseas, it's likely you've had friends and family ask for your photos... and facebook just doesn't cut it with that use case IMHO.
- cabalamat 18y ago
  Why not store the photos at whatever resolution they were uploaded, and add options for lower-res viewing or downloads? That would provide them ost functionality for everyone.
ddispaltro 18y ago
Great work, the site truly looks excellent. I love the ability to keep a group updated, with pictures, in realtime.
teuobk 18y ago
I like the simplicity, but I'm not yet sold on posting event photos here instead of Facebook. Maybe the ToS would be a deciding factor. Speaking of which, what are the ToS, especially with regard to content rights? Bug: the Java upload applet won't load for me.
jonnytran 18y ago
Arrrrgh! Registration doesn't allow + in email address.
jonnytran 18y ago
You are displaying people's email addresses? And you say you don't like spam?! Shame on you. I'm already weary giving divvyshot my email address, and now divvyshot is passing it on to every other registered user. And of course I couldn't tell that it was going to do that ahead of time b/c I had to log in to see that feature. (Looks like you can prevent the display of your email address by entering a display name in your profile, but that is not obvious at all.)
smanek 18y ago
You may want to turn off directory browsing ... Playing around for a few seconds didn't reveal anything particularly bad (although, this was very interesting: http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls). The Java applet also seems to hang firefox for me (Ubuntu 8.10 x64). I don't have another 64bit linux machine handy, so I can't tell if it's something particular to my setup though.
- thepanister 18y ago
  According to what I read at the xsl file above, it looks likt it's the costs/user... Don't tell me that this website is for scalable photo sharing! You scale up and down your photos storage, and you pay as you go!
zhyder 18y ago
You call it an alpha... did you want TechCrunch to cover it so soon: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-divvyshot-launches-dead-simple-group-photo-sharing/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-divvyshot...
- thepanister 18y ago
  It's a great way to find early adopters and testers for the product!
menloparkbum 18y ago
Java app doesn't seem to work on mac safari. When I upload from the HTML box, the javascript status thing keeps spinning and never lets me know that the file has been uploaded. I am on a relatively bad hotel connection right now.
aak 18y ago
Sam, congrats on getting techcrunched! Can you share with us your marketing/outreach efforts and how you got them to write about you in such an early stage of the product? Thanks!
- thepanister 18y ago
  I think it's the same as they wrote about likaholix.com , which is by ex-googlers, and stills at too early stage, too!
dhouston 18y ago
congrats sam!
cabalamat 18y ago
My review: 1. the drag-and-drop add photos page http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/ http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/ doesn't work, at least for me (Using Linux/KDE/Dolphin/Firefox) 2. the HTML alternative http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/form/ http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/form/ only allows one photo to be uploaded at a time. I have 7 photos I'd like to upload, varying in size between 1.7 MB and 3.4 MB. I want to be able to tell it to upload the lot in one go, not have to go back to the site 7 times and do it. 3. there should be a command-line application to upload photos. This would only be 100 or so lines of Python. It should of course allow multiple photos to be uploaded at a time (see note 2 above). 4. I uploaded a photo -- http://divvyshot.com/event/hv4x/ http://divvyshot.com/event/hv4x/ -- and can't give it a name or title. I even created an account but that didn't seem to do anything useful.
- cabalamat 18y ago
  Also, why the name? A divvy is an idiot -- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=divvy http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=divvy -- I suspect this is not the image you want to portray
terpua 18y ago
Not sure what you have for the Mac client but a suggestion: I can select an album in iPhoto (or event(s) or multiple selects) and then use either contextual menu or menubar app to upload photos. No need to drag and drop. When I open iPhoto, that's usually the time I feel like sharing.
pclark 18y ago
Turn your text into this: You and your friends went to a party. Where do you put the photos? Right here! Note the lack of orphan words.
freeman01 18y ago
You guys should try out www.imagevat.com too
- thepanister 18y ago
  I flag this because the website has a sex content!
pyroman 18y ago
I liked the video that you have after signing up. That should be easier to find for people that haven't signed up yet.
apwalker 18y ago
So I've been beta testing for two weeks and I think Divvyshot is a great service for a few reasons: 1. It allows you to share high res photos without downloading a client, sending an unreasonable number of emails with attachments, or resorting to other archaic methods like swapping jump drives. 2. You can invite other people to add photos to the same event which is awesome when you go on vacation/to a party/etc. and everyone is taking pictures with different cameras. 3. Facebook integration = one-stop posting. (Though I wish it would present separate albums on Facebook as they were created on Divvyshot). 4. It’s easy. 5. I never have to right click “save as” again if I want a friend’s picture off of Facebook.

64 points by vlad 18y ago

aston 18y ago

A little YC easter egg: If you keep refreshing until you get to the little girl's birthday photos, you'll notice all of the names are of the YC principals + baby George. Nice touch.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

thepanister 18y ago

Congratulations. Looks very attractive! If you can find a way to help users "move"/import their stuff from their current service to yours, then it would be really great. Also if you consider adding service like printing or something...

mcxx 18y ago

Those hot girls on the photos will definitely boost sing-up rate.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
vaksel 18y ago
to clear up any misunderstandings I'm sure he is talking about the girls on the beach and not the kids at the birthday party

simonista 18y ago

The design looks really nice. I already use drop box with friends to accomplish pretty much the same thing, and it wasn't immediately apparent what the added value would be to using Divvyshot. Also, the first time I went to the upload page I got a "unknown certificate. trust/don't trust" dialog which disrupted the otherwise excellent UX. Mac OS X 10.5.6, Safari 4 if that's relevant. Overall great work. I think this will be really appealing for people looking to share photos without any setup.

davincicode 18y ago

I am actually genuinely excited to use this There bringing something new(er) to photo sharing which is awesome

vaksel 18y ago

Props on using a quick sign up box. I would take out the "free" from the Alpha account, might turn away people who'll think you'll need to pay later.

thepanister 18y ago
read this at the bottom of the page: Hurry! Only 738 free alpha accounts available! After the first 1,000 accounts, we're going to charge for storage.
- nopassrecover 18y ago
  And beat the free storage competitors?

cperciva 18y ago

Here's my 10 second review: I have no clue why I should want to use this instead of flickr. I'm sure there's some reason -- but whatever it is, you might want to point it out more clearly on the front page, because otherwise those 10 seconds are probably all you're going to get from most people.

johndevor 18y ago
I believe Divvyshot is largely for grouping high-res photos centered around events (multi person gatherings with more than one camera)... and I guess it isn't as clear as it should be. Any idea on how to convey that message more clearly?
- nadim 18y ago
  Two quick and unfiltered thoughts: Host photos of actual high profile events (i.e. a conference, a concert) and link to this on the front page to show unregistered users what the site is capable of. Add a tagline to the divvyshot logo in the top left.
cdr 18y ago
Ditto. I spent 60 seconds trying to figure that out and left. The only advantage over flickr I can see is that it's free - but even that is apparently only for alpha.
alabut 18y ago
Honestly, I think it's a design issue. Interaction design, not visual design (the site's very pretty) because the answer to your question is right there on the home page, it's just nowhere near prominent enough to grab your attention in the 10 seconds you mentioned. "No account needed! It couldn't be easier! You can share photos with friends and family right now!" You can tell it's important because it's repeated again directly below, with a minor change in wording: " Share your photos NOW - No account needed! " That's actually huge, I'm guessing it's even the main feature that sold YC on accepting them (to me, "photo sharing made stupid simple" = "no account needed") especially considering that trend in recent YC startups like posterous. Actually, posterous is a great example, go look at their home page, the super prominent crossed out "make an account" line at the top of the page gets across the point really nicely.

Sam_Odio 18y ago

Hey guys, it's Sam (divvyshot's creator). The site's a piece of crap right now, but hopefully things will be better over the coming weeks. Release early and frequently, right? If you find any huge bugs email me: so / at / divvyshot / dot / com Features we've built and haven't yet launched include: - A Desktop client (PC & Mac) - Twitter, Flickr, & Facebook synchronization - Facebook application - An iPhone app (you can see real time what's happening at the event you're attending and push photos to the event from your phone) - Snipshot photo editing

thepanister 18y ago
Consider adding captcha on the signup, to prevent automation! Also, can users email their photos, even if they are not registered?
- rantfoil 18y ago
  There are other ways to prevent automation (JS) -- captcha is like one of the most damaging ways of fighting it, and it will always lower your conversion rate significantly. When you're starting out, lower conversion is a death sentence. My take: solve problems like this when you have to, not before.
jklubnik 18y ago
Allow email addresses to contain a plus. It's something a lot of gmail users like to do.
- Sam_Odio 18y ago
  Fixed, thanks for the heads up.
  - d0mine 18y ago
    `+` doesn't work in emails. TOS is scary.
- cpach 18y ago

nopassrecover 18y ago

I'm a little confused - really great execution (!!) but I don't see the business sense. I'm not sure how this differentiates itself from other file hosting/photo sharing sites. For instance can you have private photos on Flickr? At the very least there are things like drop box as mentioned. What about people who tend to share photos through Facebook? Besides which, what is the monetisation strategy? Freemium? What features will be added? There must be some sense or it wouldn't have got YC investment - maybe the idea is to execute this so well that Google buys you you as I don't think they have a good photo sharing method yet and it would be a great way to expand?

arnorhs 18y ago

About the frontpage question: "You and your friends went to a party. where do you put the photos? Right here!" --- ehh wrong, personally I'd put my photos on facebook. I have an account there, my friends do as well, so I don't get it... sorry :S

vlad 18y ago
If you want your photos on Facebook, divvyshot is the best way to get them there, as well as the best way for Facebook users to receive them, but I'm not sure how much of the functionality is in beta/secret.
pg 18y ago
If a group of you wants to put all the photos you took at some event in one place, where do you put them?
- RK 18y ago
  Dropbox?
- wheels 18y ago
  Usually in a Flickr pool.
- jupiter 18y ago
  Facebook. You can tag your friends and they will be notified. That's a huge advantage, because not only the tagged person comes to see but also her nosy friends.
  - pg 18y ago
    Sorry, I was unclear. By "one place" I meant one page, not one domain name.
- kieranoneill 18y ago
  Facebook without a doubt. It's what everyone does, and while it's slightly broken because all the albums for one event aren't linked, it's not a huge problem. It's something that would be nice for Facebook to fix, but isn't major. At least that's my opinion as a user.

savrajsingh 18y ago

Divvyshot centers on events -- not albums by individual photographers. You can quickly post a few pics and get folks uploading their photos to the same event with almost no effort. Check out the immediate photo upload -- just drag and drop into your browser! And you can click to download a zipfile of all photos in an event, at full resolution. Think of it as a new spin on photo sharing, similar to how Posterous is a new spin on blogging.

neilk 18y ago
It's drag and drop from the finder to the "Mini Divvy" app. Then it does some sort of synchronization to everywhere that's registered interest in that "event". Not sure what the use cases are, and whether it justifies a whole other app, but it's an interesting spin on sharing. You don't just get notified of something, you just get the file.

uuilly 18y ago

Your branding is at odds w/ your mission statement. High res photos speaks to pro-sumers. Party pics speaks to grainy iphone shots.

johndevor 18y ago
Sure, party pictures are one thing, and facebook handles those quite well. I don't believe Divvyshot stands to take that market from facebook. That said, if you've ever travelled overseas, it's likely you've had friends and family ask for your photos... and facebook just doesn't cut it with that use case IMHO.
cabalamat 18y ago
Why not store the photos at whatever resolution they were uploaded, and add options for lower-res viewing or downloads? That would provide them ost functionality for everyone.

ddispaltro 18y ago

Great work, the site truly looks excellent. I love the ability to keep a group updated, with pictures, in realtime.

teuobk 18y ago

I like the simplicity, but I'm not yet sold on posting event photos here instead of Facebook. Maybe the ToS would be a deciding factor. Speaking of which, what are the ToS, especially with regard to content rights? Bug: the Java upload applet won't load for me.

jonnytran 18y ago

Arrrrgh! Registration doesn't allow + in email address.

jonnytran 18y ago

You are displaying people's email addresses? And you say you don't like spam?! Shame on you. I'm already weary giving divvyshot my email address, and now divvyshot is passing it on to every other registered user. And of course I couldn't tell that it was going to do that ahead of time b/c I had to log in to see that feature. (Looks like you can prevent the display of your email address by entering a display name in your profile, but that is not obvious at all.)

smanek 18y ago

You may want to turn off directory browsing ... Playing around for a few seconds didn't reveal anything particularly bad (although, this was very interesting: http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls). The Java applet also seems to hang firefox for me (Ubuntu 8.10 x64). I don't have another 64bit linux machine handy, so I can't tell if it's something particular to my setup though.

thepanister 18y ago
According to what I read at the xsl file above, it looks likt it's the costs/user... Don't tell me that this website is for scalable photo sharing! You scale up and down your photos storage, and you pay as you go!

zhyder 18y ago

You call it an alpha... did you want TechCrunch to cover it so soon: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-divvyshot-launches-dead-simple-group-photo-sharing/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/04/y-combinators-divvyshot...

thepanister 18y ago
It's a great way to find early adopters and testers for the product!

menloparkbum 18y ago

Java app doesn't seem to work on mac safari. When I upload from the HTML box, the javascript status thing keeps spinning and never lets me know that the file has been uploaded. I am on a relatively bad hotel connection right now.

aak 18y ago

Sam, congrats on getting techcrunched! Can you share with us your marketing/outreach efforts and how you got them to write about you in such an early stage of the product? Thanks!

thepanister 18y ago
I think it's the same as they wrote about likaholix.com , which is by ex-googlers, and stills at too early stage, too!

dhouston 18y ago

congrats sam!

cabalamat 18y ago

My review: 1. the drag-and-drop add photos page http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/ http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/ doesn't work, at least for me (Using Linux/KDE/Dolphin/Firefox) 2. the HTML alternative http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/form/ http://divvyshot.com/event/F2z3/photo/add/form/ only allows one photo to be uploaded at a time. I have 7 photos I'd like to upload, varying in size between 1.7 MB and 3.4 MB. I want to be able to tell it to upload the lot in one go, not have to go back to the site 7 times and do it. 3. there should be a command-line application to upload photos. This would only be 100 or so lines of Python. It should of course allow multiple photos to be uploaded at a time (see note 2 above). 4. I uploaded a photo -- http://divvyshot.com/event/hv4x/ http://divvyshot.com/event/hv4x/ -- and can't give it a name or title. I even created an account but that didn't seem to do anything useful.

cabalamat 18y ago
Also, why the name? A divvy is an idiot -- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=divvy http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=divvy -- I suspect this is not the image you want to portray

terpua 18y ago

Not sure what you have for the Mac client but a suggestion: I can select an album in iPhoto (or event(s) or multiple selects) and then use either contextual menu or menubar app to upload photos. No need to drag and drop. When I open iPhoto, that's usually the time I feel like sharing.

pclark 18y ago

Turn your text into this: You and your friends went to a party. Where do you put the photos? Right here! Note the lack of orphan words.

freeman01 18y ago

You guys should try out www.imagevat.com too

thepanister 18y ago
I flag this because the website has a sex content!

pyroman 18y ago

I liked the video that you have after signing up. That should be easier to find for people that haven't signed up yet.

apwalker 18y ago

So I've been beta testing for two weeks and I think Divvyshot is a great service for a few reasons: 1. It allows you to share high res photos without downloading a client, sending an unreasonable number of emails with attachments, or resorting to other archaic methods like swapping jump drives. 2. You can invite other people to add photos to the same event which is awesome when you go on vacation/to a party/etc. and everyone is taking pictures with different cameras. 3. Facebook integration = one-stop posting. (Though I wish it would present separate albums on Facebook as they were created on Divvyshot). 4. It’s easy. 5. I never have to right click “save as” again if I want a friend’s picture off of Facebook.