Re:Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
by supo on Saturday November 10, 2012 @09:03PM
(#4768506)
Thanks for the compliment :) The focus of the service has to do with the focus of the interface, that is why community based services (500px, flickr, social networks as such) will always have a polluted interface (comment widgets, buttons etc) because they need to generate engagement around user content. I could be wrong here about the extent to which this pollution actually matters for users.
With dofsome we are trying to separate the photo presentation into a stand-alone service and allow the user to use their social services as distribution channels for their content.
Yeah, no point in competing with S3, better focus on a product built on top of it ;-)
At the moment I am thinking about just doing imports from online backup solutions and really focus on the presentation. For a viable storage MVP you definitely need device specific uploaders..
Re:Show HN: Dofsome.com - Chrome-less photo hosting
by e12e on Sunday November 11, 2012 @09:50PM
(#4771384)
The reason I mention DNG is because it can be used as "superset" archiving format. It should be feasible to accept pretty much any kind of RAW in, archive a copy of the raw in the DNG (or just trust the conversion) -- and so let the users have an original on your servers. Again, not sure if you want to be a backup/archive for images, or just a point of publication (for me that is all that jpeg/png will ever be -- and it's not really something I am interested in paying for -- I would still have to deal with the headache of "publishing" from my Digital Negatives -- and maintaining that collection).
As camera technology continue to improve and storage continue dropping in price (at least on the camera end, flash cards etc) I suspect more and more low end cameras will support some form of DNG-format.
I absolutely see the simplicity argument. Personally I'm not sure if 8/month is too high though. I'll have to think about it -- with the (very swift) scaling on the server, I see more what you offer -- not sure if you really fit my use case though. But you're much nicer IMNHO than flickr/picasa.
I recently priced some storage and found that Amazon/Rackspace are at around 10 cents/GB/Month (without transfer...) and a cheap dedicated server would end up around 3 cents/GB/Month (with limited transfer -- free in, 5000GB/Month out) -- but this is for ~2TB of usable storage.
With overhead (all kinds, people, hosting, transfer) -- I suspect it's not very realistic (or rather, attractive) to compete with Amazon on price. I certainly don't need 2TB "in the cloud" right now... and can't quite justify paying for it... yet ;-)
As for formats, I see a use for jpeg2000/webp (yeah, looks like jpeg2000 is pretty much dead for web...) - and for DNG. But DNG would (for now) be for archival storage. Which may or may not be a use case you want to cover.