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Show HN: DigicamFinder – open-sourced DPReview camera data (digicamfinder.com)

177 points by petergreen ↗ HN
Ever since the DPReview closure announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 we were thinking how to preserve the 25 years of valuable DPReview camera data. Archive.org has been great, but it's not usable by the general public.

The best way to keep it safe going forward, is to have the community own it, so we open sourced it: https://github.com/open-product-data/digital-cameras

I'm aware of a number of attempts to make product data open-sourced, but none have the power of the photo geeks behind it :)

Thoughts or ideas? + really looking for some contribution love.

29 comments

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dahwolf
All I can say is: well done and thank you!
_gtly
Nice work! Wish there was a site that held information on more than just cameras - expanded to all types of electronics, for instance.. seeing all the hardware from a manufacturer over time is so useful for making buying decisions.

EDIT: Ah cool, I see this: "OPD plans to expand our dataset to other product types." source: https://github.com/open-product-data/digital-cameras/commit/...

petergreen
Exactly! :) The lenses are coming next, but if there are requests for specific categories of things that would be interesting, we're all ears!

We're thinking gadgets, cars, music equipment would be a good start.

codersfocus
Wow, did you get this up in the 10 day time period since they announced closure? It took me 2 months for my project.

I think I should really look into just scraping / importing the lens data at this point for cameralenspicker.com. I’ve been hand inputting the data… but it’s just too slow.

petergreen
We really had to step on the gas with this one. There has been just so much reverberations in the photo community that it became clear that it needs to be done (and quick).

This is a great effort! But yes, manual adding is slow, so the way is likely to crowdsource/automate it.

blagie
The trick here would be to do a static scrape of all of dpreview, and post it on archive.org or similar. It's copyrighted, but I can't imagine enforcement of a discontinued resource.

Amazon is imploding a huge amount of value here.

voltaireodactyl
Thank you for making this happen, such a critical website.
dn3500
What's the copyright status? The specs you have on there now should be fine, you can't copyright lists of facts. But if you put the reviews up will Amazon come after you?
petergreen
That's why we're linking to reviews for now, instead of pulling them in.

One way is to summarize DPR member reviews with GPT4 and keep just the summary / score up.

Ultimately we want to make an awesome review tool on top of this data and start collecting original reviews.

Lammy
> But if you put the reviews up will Amazon come after you?

That would be the best possible PR for this project lol

RobotToaster
Once they delete it, they would have to use the internet archive to prove they own it, which would be rather ironic.
appleflaxen
This is just awesome. DPReview has been the gold standard for digital cameras and I am heartbroken to see it close. Thank you for performing such an incredibly generous act with the DPReview data.
rootw0rm
damn, i literally just now created a DPReview account so I could join a discussion on NX1 hacking...had no idea they were shutting down
tommyhtc
Great stuff! Curious if you plan on integrating some of the existing dpreview user reviews and Q&A. I have found those to be quite helpful as well. Also, the sample galleries might be too much to ask for given the storage requirements but wanted to see if this is part of future plans as well.
petergreen
We're considering both, but mainly listening to the "community voice" right now :)

Linking to data on other sites (including archive.org) seems like a better way to go, than pulling everything in (as you mentioned, storage reqs become a challenge fairly quickly)

LoulouMonkey
I used to love this website, and remember using it almost 20 years ago to purchase an Olympus c-5060.

Great work!

zvr
That is a great project!

Do you plan to enhance the UI, for example to be able to filter by other data, like zoom or weight?

Or are you more interested in the data and prefer others to build other websites on top of them?

petergreen
Absolutely - we're adding the rest of the filters next. Just had to cut scope in order to launch in shorter time
ulnarkressty
Are the plans for a comparison feature? This was invaluable when trying to figure out what changed in various versions of the same camera family.
mg
I run Product Chart which has a camera chart that lets you select two cameras and compare them:

https://www.productchart.com/cameras

Select "highlight" on the first camera you want to compare and then when you hover over the second, select "Compare to ..."

Does that work for you?

We have manually researched the product data for over 45,000 products. At the moment we only show currently popular cameras on the chart. But if there is demand, I could add a search for older cameras so those can be compared as well.

petergreen
interesting, thank you for the insight on the use case. yes, this is fairly easy to implement.
amelius
> If you do anything with photography, you probably know that Amazon, being Amazon, is shutting down DPReview.com, which housed some of the most complete data and knowledge related to digital cameras online.

Amazon also owns IMDB. I hope someone is making backups ...

stanac
> Amazon also owns IMDB. I hope someone is making backups ...

Yes, but they use IMDB to sell amazon prime. Same thing with goodreads, they use it to sell books on amazon.

Hasnep
Did they use DPReview to sell cameras? I imagine they did, but I hadn't heard of it until today so I'm not sure.
petergreen
they do have their links all over the site, so yes. Just likely not enough to justify keeping the entire site/team running it.
status200
Impressive that it was only a two day period between the shutdown announcement and the first version of DigicamFinder going up - well done to all those involved.