The World Needs Another Photo-Sharing Site

(Bruce Lewis)
"I've actually considered writing a photo sharing web site (since there aren't any good ones), but that's not what I'm doing right now." -- Paul Buchheit, creator of GMail.
No good ones? How could he say that? Countless people enjoy sharing their photos with the world on Webshots and Flickr. Tons of photo enthusiasts are excited about PBase. Smugmug has hundreds of thousands of paying customers and continues growing. I could go on. How can anyone say there aren't any good photo sharing sites? I know how, because I used to say it myself. I knew I could enable better, easier photo sharing, and despite being a father with a full-time job, in late 2003 I started a side project to make the world's best photo-sharing site. People I know mostly don't share photos. Once in a great while they want to order prints of digital pictures. The sites they upload to make all their money from prints, so they make viewing the pictures online dissatisfying. People order fewer prints if they're happy seeing pictures on screen. Other sites out there are more oriented towards sharing, but as I thought about photo sharing in 2003, I didn't like them either. As a parent of young children, I didn't have time to go through my photos, pick the best ones, and organize them into albums. On my own computer, I let computer programs organize my photos for me.

The Disappearing Parent Reappears

Like most people who keep a lot of digital photos, I found the best way to organize was by the month the photos were taken, then by the event they were taken at. Since most digital photos have computerized timestamps, I was able to use a program that made the monthly folders. Since most events happen on a single day, I had it make subfolders for days when photos were taken. Digital photos organize themselves. My big idea was this: Why not have a web site organize itself similarly? I wouldn't hide the photos away in folders; what I would do is present many photos on a single page, but grouped together by day. There would be a home page with the most recent days first, and an archive where you could go back to any month, making it easy to find previous vacations, birthday parties, etc. A second big idea was to make it easy to put text in with a group of photos, explaining what happened that day. Text makes photos tell a story better, but captioning individual photos is too much work. With my idea, the text would give a brief, general idea of what was happening, and the photos would fill in the details. This was a very exciting idea for me. As a parent, I had a hard time keeping my extended family updated on what my nuclear family was up to. The problem was, there were some periods when we were doing so much that there was no time to stop and write an email. Then by the time a lull came I couldn't remember all the things we had done. After implementing ourdoings.com, this pattern changed. During periods of activity I took pictures of what we did. Then in the lull I uploaded them and let the photos prompt me to describe our doings in words. My photos had mostly sat unused in folders before. Now they were part of a living story. By the end of 2004 my problem with keeping my extended family updated was solved.

Beyond Extended Family

I've met a lot of people over the years that I would like to keep up with. Wouldn't it be nice to use ourdoings.com with them the same way I do with my extended family? The only challenge is that the grandparents are interested in all the kids' doings, but for others the interest varies. When you email a link, people have to decide whether or not to break the rhythm of their email reading by switching over to the web. I made something better than emailing a link. With thumbnail images in the message itself, people could decide at a glance if it was interesting enough to click through to the web site. If not, the message would still be more interesting than your average email. And they would have wasted only a second. I programmed ourdoings.com to have a page that shows you all your photos since you last sent out an update. There's a checkbox for each day. I uncheck days that aren't of general interest. Then I type a meaningful subject line (the best way not to waste people's time), and click a button. Out it goes. I started keeping up with a wider circle.

The Imitators That Never Came

After the email update feature was working well, a handful of other people I knew began using ourdoings.com. Now that the word was out, I was bracing for an onslaught of imitators. After all, who wouldn't want to have their photos organized for them? Who wouldn't want to save work by not having to caption every photo? Who wouldn't? Photography enthusiasts, that's who. They like to present their portfolio by topic -- portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, and so on. The date the photo was taken is unimportant. What's more, they put pride in each individual photograph. Captioning each one adds a negligible amount of work, given the attention they're already giving to each photo. As it turns out, the sparse grid that traditional photo-sharing sites present is exactly what photo enthusiasts want. As in an art gallery, you space out your works so that visitors can pay attention to each photo without being distracted by the others. If you look at a professional photographer's work on one of these sites you'll see it works well. It's when you're looking at photos 21-40 of 180 from a friend's vacation, you don't appreciate the medium so much. At least one existing photo-sharing site, Smugmug, did create an email update feature that, from reading, seems similar to ourdoings.com's. But that was two years after I did it. Are Smugmug's programmers that much worse than me? No, there's another reason. Email updates aren't what most Smugmug users want. People are attracted to Smugmug, among other reasons, because they like the style. If you're particular about the style in which your photos are presented, you don't want to inline them in an email message. For one thing, a lot of style information is stripped by various mail programs, leaving a terribly plain-looking message. But even if you could make all the style get through, it would be surrounded by the rest of the mail application, possibly with clashing colors. What I think of as a great feature would be a nightmare for others.

What's The World's Best Word-Sharing Site?

Finally, I realized that my quest to make the world's best photo-sharing site was nonsense. I had made the world's best photo-sharing site for me, and for many other people who want to use photos to chronicle their doings. Other people want different things. For example, many college students like Facebook Photos because they can search for every photo that has a particular friend of theirs in it. I wouldn't want that feature. To each his own. Some people say there are too many photo-sharing sites out there. I say there aren't enough. After all, we have at least hundreds, if not thousands, of good ways to share words online. Shouldn't there be a wide choice of how to share photos? Shouldn't there be a still wider choice of ways to mix text and photos? I used to worry about competition. Now I don't. The real competition for all of us who run photo-sharing sites is your hard drive. Somebody would like to see the photos you have sitting there. Somebody would like to be able to find again the photos you occasionally email. There's a better way to do it. Find what works for you. If you can't find it, and you have the technical knowledge, do what I did. Build it. Try it.

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