date: February 2 2014
A dozen of entrepreneurs already talked to me about their idea for solving the photo mess. Which means that there are at least 20,000 entrepreneurs out there trying all possible angles to attack this problem. Yet, no one has nailed it yet. Someone will, someday. Here is my take on it.
I love simple products that are easy to understand. The more easy they are to explain to someone else, the more effective the word of mouth is going to be, which is key to get traction. So to keep it simple, my goal here is not to address the entire photo mess problem but only to address the particular issue of gathering pictures from multiple people for an event that you care about (the perfect example of such event is a birthday party or a wedding). I don't have the time to build it so feel free to give life to this idea if you like it. It's all copyleft.
We need a pastebin for photos. A place where I can quickly create a bucket where I can "copy paste" (it's more uploading in this case) the pictures I have about a shared event and invite others to contribute with their pictures.
Here is how it would work: I go to PhotoBin.io, I create a new bin by simply entering a title. It redirects me to the final private url of that album (something like pastebin.io/hash(title,salt)) that I can already copy paste and share by email or IM to my friends. Whoever opens that url get to drag and drop any image without any authentication. Once you have uploaded photos it asks you for an email if you want to be notified whenever someone ads new photos to the album. You also have the opportunity to favorite a few pictures to help everyone quickly identify what the best shots are. Once you are done (let's say after you gave everybody a week or two), you can send an automatic photo montage of the best pictures to everyone who contributed. Every one can also, if they want to, download the entire album or order a printed copy ($$).
No authentication, no friction. It's pastebin for photo sharing. I can see that working. I would totally use that for the coming wedding of my brother.
Talking of which, I believe that the wedding industry is the perfect ITM (Initial Target Market). Weddings is the obvious use case where you have both photos that everyone would want to get (the ones of the professional photographer) and photos from dozen of amateur photographers that a few, including the bride and groom, want to easily gather in one place. And all participants would gladly receive a short photo montage of the best shots.
Hack away!