We're probably going to hit the 20,000 photos milestone today. It's not much. But our users are allowed to upload only one photo per day. That's 20,000 days of couple of hundred people. Almost 55 years worth of photos :)
I'm looking for feedback on the UX, design and also any tips on getting traction, which I really struggle with.
Quite a lot of users keep uploading daily. If you do that, your "Streak number" grows. Once you stop uploading for more than two days - the streak number goes back to zero (you can still upload those missed photos though). You can see a list of users sorted by their streak number here: https://tookapic.com/projects?sort=streak
As backend framework we're using Laravel hosted on digital ocean. Images are hosted on Amazon S3, we also queue uploads to S3 with SQS. Imgix is great service and I can't even imagine building tookapic without it. For database we use postgresql. Any other questions :)?
Actually we're testing premium features, like custom domains and themes. username.tookapic.com would be reserved for premium users. Right now pawelkadysz.tookapic.com points to 404 (which should be fixed next week). But the custom domain hooked up to the site works just fine, see for yourself: http://daily.pawelkadysz.com - this is the kind of premium theme I'm talking about (it's all powered by tookapic).
As for the slugs and URLs. At first we had it like this: tookapic.com/username/ID-slug but we had some issues with people changing their usernames (that's allowed) and putting weird characters in the photo titles, which all resulted in breaking the links and pointing to 404 in the end.
That's why we changed it to how it works now. No username change nor emoji in photo title will break the link now.
Looks cool. The only little nitpick I have is that the "place to start your 365 project" tagline made me think it was referring to Office365 at first. Not sure if that's just me though.
I see you offer stock photos, are these the users photos? Do we give up the rights to our own photos by using this service. Can you elaborate on this some more?
It's up to you if you want to share those photos as free, or even sell them for real money. You can of course keep all the copyrights and even watermark your photos.
Minor suggestion, make the TOS link on your signup form open in a new window, that way someone signing up without manually opening in new window won't lose what they've typed.
Y Combinator had funded a previous version of this concept, called DailyBooth, but it eventually shut down. You have a slightly different take on it though, making it a 365 project (and allowing people to sell photos). I thought it was a fun website and was sad when it shut down. I wish you a better fortune than they had :).
Minimum photo size is 1280px (width). As far as I know iPhones have 8MP cameras. Unless you crop it to 50% the size it should work just fine. Also, there's an iOS app coming in a couple of weeks which will make uploading from iPhone much, much easier.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 62.1 ms ] threadI'm looking for feedback on the UX, design and also any tips on getting traction, which I really struggle with.
Thank you!
Some would have surely missed some day. True? Any data on that?
Can you share tech stack used?
And what exactly you use to store the photos?
Edit: I see you are using imgix but I feel they are bit costly. Did you compare them with anyone before finalizing them?
Confusion you use s3 for images then why do you use imagix too?
My only suggestion would be with the domain you have, make user pages subdomains. It's easy to achieve in Laravel and makes a more pleasing url.
Instead of https://tookapic.com/photos/21408 you could make it https://pawelkadysz.tookapic.com/21408
And even take that a step further and use slugs for urls instead of ID's https://pawelkadysz.tookapic.com/playing-with-light
URL design is a huge thing that many often ignore, but I feel is essential to a website.
Actually we're testing premium features, like custom domains and themes. username.tookapic.com would be reserved for premium users. Right now pawelkadysz.tookapic.com points to 404 (which should be fixed next week). But the custom domain hooked up to the site works just fine, see for yourself: http://daily.pawelkadysz.com - this is the kind of premium theme I'm talking about (it's all powered by tookapic).
As for the slugs and URLs. At first we had it like this: tookapic.com/username/ID-slug but we had some issues with people changing their usernames (that's allowed) and putting weird characters in the photo titles, which all resulted in breaking the links and pointing to 404 in the end.
That's why we changed it to how it works now. No username change nor emoji in photo title will break the link now.
Regarding usernames, well I see the usecases for allowing changes and not allowing. So I guess that's up to you.
All in all, I love the project. I'm not a photographer but the design of the site is beautiful, and well. I'm jealous. haha.
It's up to you if you want to share those photos as free, or even sell them for real money. You can of course keep all the copyrights and even watermark your photos.
You have all the choices on the upload page: http://cl.ly/c6Qt
Minor suggestion, make the TOS link on your signup form open in a new window, that way someone signing up without manually opening in new window won't lose what they've typed.