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Show HN: Tookapic – Take one photo a day for 365 days (tookapic.com)
32 points by pawelkadysz 3984 days ago
6 comments

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.

Thank you!

Awesome congrats for achieving that figure. Its not that easy to reach that milestone. Plus I dont think everyone would surely upload a pic daily.

Some would have surely missed some day. True? Any data on that?

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
Awesome work.

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?

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 :)?
I just saw this thread while browsing the Show HN section. Nice stack, Laravel is a good framework.

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.

S3 for hosting, imgix for image manipulation
Almost similar stack we use. Good to hear that :)

Confusion you use s3 for images then why do you use imagix too?

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?
All the details are available on the licensing page: https://tookapic.com/licensing

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

@pawelkadysz thanks for the reply. That is what I hoped! I love it. The site is a neat idea. Keep it up.
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.
Really cool idea!

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.

Good point. We'll take care of it first thing tomorrow.
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 :).
The size restrictions prevent uploading iPhone photos, which seems kinda ridiculous.
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.
Ah, I had taken it in portrait orientation. Maybe taking the longest edge would make sense?