[Sam_Odio]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all the congratulations. We're thrilled to be joining the Facebook team. Frankly it's still taking time for everything to sit in.

I'll admit that it's bittersweet. When you spend 18 months obsessing over your company it's hard to see it go. It ultimately came down to the decision that we could touch more people's lives at Facebook...and that's what we've been in this for all along.

<shameless thread co-opt>

Since this post is going to get a lot of eyeballs I want to take this chance to solicit any suggestions/feedback/complaints HNers have for Facebook Photos. I can't comment on exactly what we'll be doing at Facebook, but I can promise whatever you tell me will get in front of the "right people." :)

If you want you can email me directly: [e-mail]

----

Since their legal department might read this: I'm not yet a Facebook employee and I'm not speaking on behalf of Facebook, anything you tell me is going to be placed in the public domain, you waive all rights to ownership over any IP that Facebook ends up implementing, etc.

</shameless>

[necubi]

The biggest issue with facebook photos is the resolution. Most people have 7MP+ cameras now, but facebook resizes them to ~600x450. While I can understand facebook being reluctant to store large pictures, it has become the primary way for many people to share their photos, and it's a shame that so much gets thrown away.

[bradgessler]

Yes, meaningful access to the original high-resolution images. By "meaningful" I mean stuff like downloading everything in a zip archive ($10 says fb doesn't do this) to working with iPhoto, Picassa, Flickr, etc. I would even be willing to. pay a couple bucks to download high-res images in a zip file

I promise you if fb doesn't provide decent access to the high-resolution images, DivvyShot will be reinvented by a different founder under a different name and offered up as a paid service. Yep, its that valuable, and Flickr has proven people are willing to pay for this stuff.

[justinchen]

We have a service called The Wedding Lens that lets you do this: http://www.theweddinglens.com

Group uploading, full-size resolution uploads and (bulk) downloads.

[hugothefrog]

My partner and I just had a ten year anniversary in Thailand, and we're in the process of sharing our entire groups' photos via Divvyshot. If you had a less wedding-oriented skin/store-front on that website, we'd love to use your service..

[justinchen]

Unfortunately our service is only focused on weddings. We originally started with a broader site but then decided to focus on the more lucrative wedding market where people are more willing to pay for services. We have had quite a number of people use the TheWeddingLens for things like birthdays and parties since it still gets the job done (high res photos and bulk downloads). Our long term intent is to expand to the broader market after we attain a decent level of success with weddings.

If you're interested in trying it out I can give you a discount coupon code, just email me at justin [at] theweddinglens.com

[lpolovets]

My wife and I used WeddingLens for our wedding last year, and we got ~1000 photos within about a week (our wedding had about 60 guests). Well worth the price.

[justinchen]

Leo, glad it worked well for you. I've added your testimonial to the site: http://www.theweddinglens.com/testimonials

[drusenko]

agreed, that's pretty much my only frustration with facebook photos. the resolution is horrible. i can understand not storing the full resolution, but 600x450 or so is just WAY too small.

[dustingetz]

hmm, I've never found it to be an issue, and I'm not sure facebook's dominant demographic cares either.

[phreanix]

I have a feeling that will be something tackled down the line with a 'premium' paid account. Divvyshot seems to have this as a future offering as well.

[stanleydrew]

Divvyshot has always stored full-res photos.

[lotharbot]

First off, congratulations!

Now, suggestions:

1) ability to resize tag boxes to some degree

2) ability to drag tags around, instead of having to remove and re-click to place them

3) ability to change an existing tag. Example: when my mom joined facebook, I had to go back and delete all of the tags to her name (unlinked) and then add in new tags to her name (linked to her profile). It would have been easier to have an "update tag" button that let me link that tag to her profile (preferably for the whole album, but one-by-one would be better than nothing.)

4) I know facebook stores multiple sizes of photos. It would be neat to have more direct control over that -- say, to pick our own thumbnails, or to allow certain photos to be displayed in higher resolutions.

[cmelbye]

Sorry, I accidentally voted that down (the arrows are not very iPhone friendly), but yes, all of the above!

[BrandonM]

Face recognition technology has been around for years. A partner and I even implemented a rudimentary tool for it in a few weeks in an AI course. I always wondered why Facebook couldn't take advantage of this and save the world thousands, if not millions of cumulative hours tagging photos.

[makeee]

Tagging friends in a photo is a meaningful social action, just like commenting or liking a status update. Automating this would give users one less way to interact with their friends on the site.

[Caligula]

Two reasons come to mind,

Even a 5% error rate is unacceptable. People may take offense to machine tag errors.

Second, facebook probably likes the time commitment people make to tagging photos and adding friends in order to tag them to the picture. It increases communication and also adds cases where people get facebook invites so they can get tagged.

[BrandonM]

The solution to the 5% error is to do the tagging automatically, but make the uploading friend confirm each photo to ensure that it was tagged properly.

I don't consider tagging itself to be inherently social. Being in a social setting with someone is what was social. Putting a picture of someone on Facebook is social. You can still comment on an auto-tagged picture just the same as a manually-tagged one. The only difference is that you save some time for those people who contribute the most (the friends who take dozens of pictures at every event and then spend a couple hours uploading/tagging them the next day). By decreasing the necessary effort of photo-sharing, I would expect to see more uploading and tagging.

A side benefit is that it could eventually make discovery easier. How many pictures do you have at a bar or somewhere else with a bunch of people you don't know in the background? How many times have you hung out someone somewhere, have a picture of them, but didn't get or can't remember their name? Automatic recognition gives you a better chance of meeting some of these people again.

For those saying this is a privacy issue, the uploader doesn't have to see the auto-tag of a non-friend. Instead, the person who has been auto-tagged could be notified and have the option of allowing/disallowing the tag to occur.

[pclark]

I read facebook looked at doing this, but their users were already manually tagging all their photos (and cool with that) so the additional hardware/implementation resources were errrr spent elsewhere.

[drusenko]

there are a lot of situations where you don't want to tag a photo of a friend, the way tags are implemented on facebook.

i generally wouldn't tag a friend in a picture where they look bad, and there are all kinds of social situations where a friend wouldn't want to be tagged in a particular photo -- because one girl would see them with another girl, for example.

[jakecarpenter]

I'm not an AI guy, but isn't having people tag their photos is creating a gold mine of data for when they do automate the process?

[kevintwohy]

Congrats again, Sam!

One thing that I'd love to see your guys' hands on is the notion of 'ownership' of FB photos -- this is something that was definitely in the DNA of Divvyshot, and it would be really interesting to see FB explore some models of shared/group ownership of content.

[gaborcselle]

I'd like to sync certain directories on my harddrive with FB photos so I don't have to go through the current Java applet-based upload photos process.

[mixmax]

Maybe facebook should acquire dropbox...

[RK]

Please no...

I want to keep using Dropbox.

[akkartik]

Fear not. Dropbox has revenues.

[brlewis]

One can integrate a photo sharing site with Dropbox without acquiring Dropbox. I did.

[lotharbot]

I thought of something additional:

Group photo album ownership.

Example: I would love to be able to make a "family photos" album that is shared between me, my wife, and my son. I don't see any reason to have to duplicate their albums, and think it's silly that people have to add all three of us (or look in three places) to see all of our family pictures. If one of us could make an album and add the other two as co-owners, it would be a lot easier for us to put up family pics.

[timdorr]

View counters would be nice.

Larger views would also be nice.

And most important, color correction has to be fixed. It's been improved, but whatever they're doing on the backend for compression is muting and killing all color in my photos when I upload them :/

[TorKlingberg]

One-way tagging.

People occasionally upload party pictures and tag you in them. It is good that people watching the photos can see who are in them, and go to their profiles. The problem is that it also shows up under "Photos of X" where potential employers and girlfriends parents can see them. So you you have to go and untag yourself from any photos where you look stupid.

Let me remove pictures from "Photos of X" while still staying tagged in them.

[potatolicious]

The Java applet is really bad, pleeeease find another way for users to upload their photos.

Here are some major pain points (and some suggestions):

- The reliability of Facebook Photos is pretty suspect - the AJAX picture loader will get hung up randomly, increased reliability here will make the system a lot more polished.

- The Java upload tool really, really sucks. I would even take a Flash uploader over it, and I really despise Flash. Letting the users interact directly with their file systems may not also be a great idea - can you slurp directly from a memory card or camera connected via USB? This may convince more people to use Facebook as their only stop for photo storage.

- Photo API could use some work - right now the Lightroom Facebook plugin can't seem to delete photos. This means that when I make modifications to a photo and re-publish it just creates new photos on top of the old ones. The Flickr API allows overwrites, which means that the files can be seamlessly replaced, preserving comments and other data.

- iPhoto's facial recognition stuff is really really really cool, it'd be great if Facebook shamelessly stole it :)

[naner]

My grandmother has boxes and boxes of old photos that are unorganized and as it stands will probably be lost forever soon enough.

I think it would be cool if some company would partner with kodak or wallgreens or whoever is running all those 1hr photo developing places that are somehow still in business. They should be outfitted with specialized photo scanners and staffed with professionals who can help scan a lot of photos quickly. Then these photos could be archived online and partially sorted with that facial-recognition software. Maybe dates and annotations could be pulled off of handwriting on the back of photos if it is clear enough. Some kind of family-tree arrangement would be nice, too.

Anyways, I honestly don't expect Facebook or anyone else to implement this. It is too costly and difficult and laborious. I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it. But there's my suggestion.

[budu3]

They need to fix the performance problems. I've had problems viewing pictures on several occasions. It feels sluggish at times. This is understandable though, seeing as they are the largest photo storage site on the internet.

[flipbrad]

How's about not claiming to take ownership of my IP for the mere service of hosting and labelling my pics?

[diN0bot]

fun widget for viewing a random photo a day from one friend. i have tons of friends, each with tons of photos....i want to engage with them (these aren't folks i speak to normally), but it's overwhelming.