With more and more of user's content on the web, we decided it should be far easier for users to work with that content on websites. Hope you like it! It's rough, but we wanted to get feedback as we work on it.
It sounds like Imgur with an Aviary plug in attatched to it.
The only additional places you're pulling from are dropbox and facebook. Do you have plans to pull from more locations?
Also, do you have plans to allow website owners to integrate this with their own site (much like Aviary allows you to integrate the editor you're using)?
Hmmm, I'd want a client capable of seeking out images stored as a background image or underneath a invisible div that some site owners use to protect their image. But that's probably impossible.
I've wanted a service like this for a while but haven't had time to make it. A few other ways you could get photos from users:
- get a picture from their phone. This seems really important and useful, but I'm not sure the best way to do this. Ideas:
1) let them email it from their phone to a special email address
2) give them a url that takes them to a site that opens up an "upload" dialog
Both of these my be accomplishable w/ a QR code
- let them paste in a URL of an image. I've used embed.ly for this. It will take all sort of urls: plain images (rare for non-technical users), Flickr URLs, etc
I like it. It's sleek, easy to use and very well implemented. Congratulations on creating this, I will keep this in mind in case I ever need it in the future.
1. I don't want things opening in a new window on my site
2. I don't want someone else's branded module opening on my site
3. This is designed using bootstrap
If you hired a real designer, made it a script that could open a modal on my site, and gave the option to pay some small fee to get rid of your branding and give it a few color theming options, I would be totally on board.
1. Good to know. It'd be interesting to know how the community feels about windows vs iframes. We felt like windows were more analogous to system dialogs, but iframes are easier for message passing
2. Would you pay for custom branding?
3. I defer to other articles re. bootstrap. We figured if we wanted to match the styling of other sites in the best possible way, bootstrap is a decent choice
This is a good business model you guys are aiming for. I think people would definitely pay for custom branding and you're solving a current pain point! Would have used this in a couple of projects I've been involved in.
To this comment - yes, that was what I said originally. agreed.
To the above response, if it was good enough I'd pay for custom branding for sure. Is the aviary module supposed to be part of the service? For me, that's not really a good addition. Perhaps as an option that can be enabled. If you could just give me a really nice looking modal that allowed a file upload through the ways you provided, hosted the files for me and gave me back a url, that would be enough to merit a small payment at least. I'd only include a very small branding badge at the bottom but have the option to remove that for an additional price.
Apologies if I missed a nuance but it would be more helpful if you explained why...? Are you saying the OP is spending too much time pontificating when they should be handing the work to a trained professional? Or are you disagreeing with what they said?
You have to read the three reasons posted above and then the explanation. The service as implemented on the backend looks good but on the front end they need some help of the professional kind.
Also, including the Aviary viewer in the demo takes away from the product.
I presume your limitations are due to the drag drop file handling on the upload from computer?
I did something recently like this and ended up with an ugly "Select file" button when people are in IE.
I really hope IE are pulling their fingers out with IE10, it appears they are. We are getting a load of adverts in the UK now on Microsoft products, like Bing etc. It seems to me they are taking it seriously again.
Actually the drag-drop isn't as big of a deal as cross-domain message passing. We'll likely end up having to use a flash fallback or similar, but last night as we were hacking on this we decided to punt for a day or two
I was actually really surprised when I discovered this when developing the bulk upload facility I did. It wasn't great when 9/10 computers in our office are Macs. Didn't make it worthwhile showing it off to people in our place!
I'm sure they will all support it soon enough and my days coding it will be worthwhile.
Sorry for the late followup, but thanks for the link. getFile is a callback for when a file is uploaded, not a way to just get one file (I'm coming from an ActiveRecord/Ruby view of things).
I think the point is that is will support pulling files from any service you use to store them - dropbox, facebook, your computer, skydrive, etc. It's much more than a pretty file upload UI, and the fact that it looks that simple is actually its greatest achievement.
Putting images on a web page is easy, so we see images everywhere on the Web. If it were also easy, we would expect to see good file upload widgets everywhere. Good file upload widgets are not everywhere. From this, we can conclude that it is still an open problem.
This is great and I would pay to use it in a second if it could handle uploads on the iphone/ipad (something like http://www.aurigma.com/iphone/). I just signed up for the developer key. Will you be emailing that list with feature updates/news? Thanks
Re. email, we'll be trying to limit the number of emails we send out to the lowest possible, but if there's interest we can create a separate mailing list that's higher volume for feature announcements, etc. over the coming week.
Hey Liyan, I would want this as something I, as the developer, could specify. A social site might want all the options there, but for my sites I'm worried about conversion and wouldn't want the added confusion of having upload choices that my customers are rarely going to use.
However, a small nitpick : When I click "Get a key" without entering any Email, I get an Internal Server Error at /thanks/. Probably you guys should handle edge cases?
I like the concept and hope the team keeps exploring more. I wonder whether we can get additional information about the image - time, location, people tagged in it etc
We can't say this for certain, but what we'd like to do it put it down in writing that if for any reason we can't provide the service anymore, we open-source it. Would this help?
This is an excellent idea and it looks nicely executed, too. I only fear there may be a duplication of efforts in respect to the upcoming WebIntents framework. Do you guys have plans to integrate with it at some point?
Looks neat! However, you won't catch me putting my credit card details into that donations form. You might want to put a paypal button or something that makes me feel a bit more secure about the whole thing.
i think the facebook integration is less than optimal. If my site uses facebook login, and a user is asked for facebook again on initial use with filepicker the experience would be confusing.
That's a great thought. Custom stylesheets is on the feature map, but we should also be looking into someway of reducing the facebook double login as well. Thanks for this feature idea.
So let me see if I have this straight: you differ from other file uploaders out there (e.g., https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload/) in that you allow "upload from anywhere", plus a quite nice interface? Not to belittle it, those are solid additions to the space.
edit: Btw, if you're looking for IE support on the from-computer upload, look into using iframes for transport.
I'm your target audience. I've built this exact function into client apps (upload from various sources and edit with Aviary). Its a PITA.
I'd consider yours, but there's a couple big problems right now:
1) Doesn't support IE.
2) Doesn't work on mobile
There's other issues, but those are the show-stoppers.
FWIW, Chute (http://getchute.com) has a better implementation of this concept. That said, I still haven't seen enough of a value add here (with Filepicker or with Chute) to depend on yet another black box service that may shut down tomorrow.
Thanks for mentioning us. We definitely offer a very similar set of features with Slidechute.
I think the value add comes in many different ways, but we're just at the beginning of that process so it's not always all evident.
As for the black box, there's not a lot of Voodoo with us. Since launching we allow you to store media in your own S3 bucket and also to customize your app credentials so the authentication happens against your app.
Would love to know what features you thought would add the kind of value you need.
Hey Greg and Liyan! Those are great steps, didn't know you had done them. Helps a bit. I'd still have to replace your widget, but it would at least be possible.
I'm certainly open to brain-picking, email me anytime (in my profile).
Qeorge, completely agree. Those are the two aspects that we should really nail so that others don't have to deal with it. I'll be sure to update you when I've learned more about IE and their Javascript engine then I ever wanted to know.
I'd be curious to pick your brain about what you think would add that additional value.
it's worth noting that it can't work on mobile - mobile safari does not support any kind of file uploads. But not working in IE is definitely a fatality
Once we get filepicker.io working on mobile browsers, sites using filepicker.io would allow users files directly from Dropbox, Facebook, etc without the iPhone directly supporting it.
@brettcvz, you guys need to validate your email input for empty strings when signing up for a dev key. On the project note, looks very promising, keep up the good work.
Nice it's great that you used bootstrap so that if I change my bootstrap file it will change the module. Bootstrap for developer who aren't great designer has been a amazing tool. It has open my eyes to modules like this that gives my app the same feel.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadThe only additional places you're pulling from are dropbox and facebook. Do you have plans to pull from more locations?
Also, do you have plans to allow website owners to integrate this with their own site (much like Aviary allows you to integrate the editor you're using)?
And yeah, you can use it on your site right now. Grab a key and you're good to go
As a site owner, not having to write yet another bookmarklet would be great.
- get a picture from their phone. This seems really important and useful, but I'm not sure the best way to do this. Ideas: 1) let them email it from their phone to a special email address 2) give them a url that takes them to a site that opens up an "upload" dialog Both of these my be accomplishable w/ a QR code
- let them paste in a URL of an image. I've used embed.ly for this. It will take all sort of urls: plain images (rare for non-technical users), Flickr URLs, etc
1. I don't want things opening in a new window on my site
2. I don't want someone else's branded module opening on my site
3. This is designed using bootstrap
If you hired a real designer, made it a script that could open a modal on my site, and gave the option to pay some small fee to get rid of your branding and give it a few color theming options, I would be totally on board.
Would love to chat about what you'd use if for, if you have the time.
Stop. Hire a designer.
To the above response, if it was good enough I'd pay for custom branding for sure. Is the aviary module supposed to be part of the service? For me, that's not really a good addition. Perhaps as an option that can be enabled. If you could just give me a really nice looking modal that allowed a file upload through the ways you provided, hosted the files for me and gave me back a url, that would be enough to merit a small payment at least. I'd only include a very small branding badge at the bottom but have the option to remove that for an additional price.
Also, including the Aviary viewer in the demo takes away from the product.
Is this considered okay again? Best Viewed in [Netscape 3.0] or [Internet Explorer]
I did something recently like this and ended up with an ugly "Select file" button when people are in IE.
I really hope IE are pulling their fingers out with IE10, it appears they are. We are getting a load of adverts in the UK now on Microsoft products, like Bing etc. It seems to me they are taking it seriously again.
I'm sure they will all support it soon enough and my days coding it will be worthwhile.
Make sure you put the imports in too. Hope you like it, and let us know if you need a hand
This is great and I would pay to use it in a second if it could handle uploads on the iphone/ipad (something like http://www.aurigma.com/iphone/). I just signed up for the developer key. Will you be emailing that list with feature updates/news? Thanks
Re. email, we'll be trying to limit the number of emails we send out to the lowest possible, but if there's interest we can create a separate mailing list that's higher volume for feature announcements, etc. over the coming week.
However, a small nitpick : When I click "Get a key" without entering any Email, I get an Internal Server Error at /thanks/. Probably you guys should handle edge cases?
Just to be clear, would you like that information at the dialog or would you like the app developer to be able to see it?
Part of this is also an effort to spur the webintents forward :D
It's a post on G+ showing WebIntents & picking files via pick intent and cloudfilepicker.com (a Picasa image picker).
I guess I don't have much money to steal; I'll look into PayPal for those lucky ones who have assets to protect :D
Though if you do end up adding a paypal button try not to use the word "donate", paypal seems to have a problem with non-charities doing this.
edit: Btw, if you're looking for IE support on the from-computer upload, look into using iframes for transport.
I'd consider yours, but there's a couple big problems right now:
There's other issues, but those are the show-stoppers.FWIW, Chute (http://getchute.com) has a better implementation of this concept. That said, I still haven't seen enough of a value add here (with Filepicker or with Chute) to depend on yet another black box service that may shut down tomorrow.
Thanks for mentioning us. We definitely offer a very similar set of features with Slidechute.
I think the value add comes in many different ways, but we're just at the beginning of that process so it's not always all evident.
As for the black box, there's not a lot of Voodoo with us. Since launching we allow you to store media in your own S3 bucket and also to customize your app credentials so the authentication happens against your app.
Would love to know what features you thought would add the kind of value you need.
I'm certainly open to brain-picking, email me anytime (in my profile).
I'd be curious to pick your brain about what you think would add that additional value.
And yes, we are working on IE support.