Ok Color. How about solving the more basic (and important) problem with photos? | Hacker News Reader

Ok Color. How about solving the more basic (and important) problem with photos?

sethlevine.com

4 pointsjedwhite7 comments

-10 for piggybacking on the color hype

+100 for a spot on idea.

(and no it's not just dropbox for photos - it should find and deduplicate and centralise them. Plus it should be able to read the libraries of all of the major photo organisation apps - iphoto and all the others)

We're doing this (but better). And we're hiring. http://blog.getgush.com Get in touch if you're in Canada.

DropBox for photos? It's a great idea.

http://dustin.github.com/2011/02/27/dropbox-queue.html -- works for me. :)

Thanks for this. Photography and CouchDB are two of my favourite things. I've been looking for a Flickr replacement, so I might try a similar setup to yours.

The app is pretty much a ground-up rewrite and has a ways to go vs. the previous version. It's much more awesome, though.

I've lost pictures in the past due to things that it's really hard to repeat with this version. The act of adding a photo from "share" into dropbox automatically makes the copy exist in dropbox's cloud (which is S3, I suppose) and my computers that sync with it. It's deleted from dropbox (but will stay for ~30 days) and placed into a work directory until I manually delete it by a process that places it in S3 first, then my local couchdb, then replicates that couchdb off site. If I'm home (or at least, my computer is), it also replicates to my laptop immediately, otherwise I'll eventually pick up the pics.

Hopefully I'll get bored with reliability and start making new features again. :) I'd be glad to help you out if you want to try what I've got, though.

I thought about this some more over the weekend, and one thing that occurred to me is that virtually all of my photos go via Adode Lightroom. The image files don't change; instead, all of the metadata and retouch history lives in Lightroom's database. I guess users of Aperture and iPhoto are in a similar position.

Plain image files are fine on the way out of the camera (and maybe via a laptop), and on the way to the Internet (which will use low-res .jpgs with embedded metadata), but my central repository is currently Lightroom, which doesn't like opening up its database.

Lightroom can, however, talk to external photo services through a plugin system; its Flickr and Facebook exports work like this. So maybe your photo app is another of these services, as far as Lightroom is concerned.

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