That's why we built myphotos.site - a micro SaaS that allows anyone to create a slick, minimal gallery website from Google Photos. Galleries can be iframe-embedded for those looking for full customization.
One thing we haven't solved yet - many Google Photos users (myself included) do not have images pre-organized in albums, so the fact that technically it takes 60 seconds to build a website doesn't take into account that you have to spend time picking the right images.
Would love to some feedback/ideas from hobbyist photographers here!
I didn't have any easy solution and this looks promising, congrats!
A few dealbreaker things I can share:
- she has lots of albums already on gphoto. She'd need to easily import them.
- she makes heavy use of the map and text blocks you can add in gphoto albums, which makes each album a kind of travel diary. I don't get the sense these are supported in your product yet, these would be required for her.
- she doesn't have a ton of videos but sometimes she does have a few.
- I'd have some concerns about the longevity of your product - if she invests time into it she wants to be able to look back at the albums in 10-20 years time. Having a convenient way to export the albums would be reassuring to me.
- I think she has a few 1000s photos in those albums, so your highest tier would be too low for her, if there was a way to buy storage that might suit her usage better (though she has a hobbyist budget).
It might be technically difficult and you rejected that path already, but I'm thinking an ideal way for her would be to keep editing her albums in gphotos and sync them to your site, which would take care of the longevity concerns and allow her to keep using the interface she knows (if you linked directly to the pics/vids on google server that would eliminate the cost of storing pictures for you, but I assume that's impossible or prohibited by google's tos).
Anyway, just sharing my use case in case that's useful but congrats on launching and on the good looking product!
Second, thanks for the detailed thoughts!
Easy import of existing albums - We have that! find the album on GPhotos, select all and import. Check out how quick it is here: https://youtu.be/7gi58SuQ6Rk?si=Wk1wtDoPO5_DYWEV
Map and text blocks - These are currently not supported, but we're still considering different use cases and will add features to match the ones we focus on soon.
Videos - These are currently not supported but might be added soon. They pose some storage and pricing issues but we'll try to solve that. Again depending on the use case we end up pursuing
Longevity - This is a legitimate concern. Obviously we're hoping that this product keeps growing and plan to maintain it. Regardless - The north star of this product is to be fast and easy to set up. So we hope that the time investment won't be that big anyhow.
Pricing and Storage - We've just launched so the pricing plans will definitely change over time. We'll take that into account.
Syncing albums - Seamlessly syncing albums to online galleries was our dream. Unfortunately Google's API doesn't support that (for obvious security and privacy concerns).
We'd love for your mom to give our product a try and will be happy to give her a generous period of free usage of the premium plan for some of her feedback. If you're interested, please reach out at hey@myphotos.site.
Thanks again!
Or
Would a static site with a list of links to Google Photos albums work? I've done this with my family.
If so, there are ample static website providers out there.
My girlfriend runs an art studio that does art workshops. She uses Google workspace. She and her other teachers use Google workspace and have Google photos. They create albums of each workshop.
They want to have all the albums in one place so the social media person can easily find and use them.
Ideally there should be a way to make a Google photos account shared with the rest of the team. Unfortunately Google photos is not officially part of Workspace so it’s not treated as a b2b product.
Using Google for my photos is a no go though so hopefully OP will come up with a solution for that.
Embed - it is a feature we pushed yesterday so still no proper documentation on that. It's as simple as importing images -> clicking on an "embed" button and grabbing the iframe code. Requires some technical understanding. We might improve to be platform-specific (Webflow, Wix) if there's a real need.
And as for the guides you're seeing are complete gen-AI slob, I agree. Not something we're that proud of, but mostly for SEO to be able to acquire users at a reasonable price. We're running ads campaigns but with our low pricing, it'll be really hard to be profitable so SEO is one way.
I think there's an extra level of trust that needs building from a branding perspective because of how personal it feels to hand over personal images to someone to host for you, even if they become public anyway. It's interesting to see how people react to this sort of thing as it's very new.
Good luck!
I recommend going for other marketing strategies such as collaborations with bloggers and influencers in your niche (photo enthusiasts?). Better targeted, less vulnerable to the whims of Google's algorithm.
no, this is a skill issue. follow fofr_ai to get tips on getting realistic photos. its not hard, you just havent tried.
Does this work for video?
I recently digitized about 80 home videos from 30-40 years ago. Each of the 80 videos is 2 hours of 5-10 minute recordings from the olden days when turning "record" on and off didn't automatically create a new video file. I've been wondering the best way to post-edit and share them with other people in my family.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "select='gt(scene,0.4)',showinfo" -reset_timestamps 1 -vsync vfr -f segment output%03d.mp4
(Both Claude and ChatGPT are excellent at cooking up ffmpeg scripts, but sometimes you need to ask both, or reword the prompt a bit to get something that works)
First of all - thanks!
Re: Videos - we currently don't support them but might add that capability in the future. Videos complicate things both in terms of the product and because they're much more expensive to store, so they'll complicate the unit economics.
Regardless - online video storage is currently very expensive. The leading platforms are Vimeo and Wistia, so you might consider them for now.
About editing - what are you looking to do? I'll try to point you in the right direction.
Or
I’d suspect the storage cost of this approach might even be similar or less than AWS glacier storage..
BuyVM has been around for a long time and very stable and excellent reputation. You’ll find that your costs would be much lower if you’d “uncloud” (I’m obviously assuming that you are using AWS or a cloud, but maybe not!)
I wanted to build something similar, but at that time photos did not expose APIs to get list of photos.
What was your work around? Or have they opened up the APIs now?
At first, we wanted to auto-sync galleries and were bummed by the way this API works, but tbh it ended up being more private and secure for the user (no auto-syncing that embarrassing picture that shouldn't be online) and helped us avoid implementing a picker on our end.
Do you mind sharing more?
How did that work out for you? Did you encounter any technical issues with working with Apple's app? Why did you end up pausing the project?
Would love to hear from you,
Or
So I paused it.
Also on top of that dealing with photos and videos are not cheap and would be harder for me to scale things.
Basically it was a fun little experiment.
We'd love to hear more to understand what problems we could solve better.
(and server-side secure!)
See e.g. [1] and [2] for more info and [3] for an implementation.
[1]: https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1 [2]: https://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/google-plus-layout-find-be... [3]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-photo-gallery
The thinking behind the vertical masonry grid is that by always having semi-visible pictures in view it draws the eyes down to keep scrolling. If that makes sense.
Will definitely check out the links and consider further.
Or
Our product is for people who are looking for a more advanced publishing option. Something like a website or portfolio, but super quick and easy to create.
Does that make sense?
I think the pricing might be a bit tricky. The free plan allows 50 photos whereas the free plan on Flickr allows 1000 photos (and no limit on albums IIRC). Can you elaborate a bit on how you plan to differentiate?
Pricing is indeed something we're still trying to figure out.
Currently we see differentiation as a combination of simplicity and elegance/visual quality. Meaning platforms like Flicker are too cluttered and outdated in terms of how galleries look.
But in this too we still have a lot to learn and figure out.
This is very much a solution to a problem I have, too, one that was taken care of by Google Business sites before they threw it in the bin
https://support.google.com/business/answer/https://support.g...
Wordpress and other blog sites require quite a lot of effort and technical knowledge. We aim to democratize photo sharing and let anyone do it quickly and effortlessly.
Does that make sense?
The user galleries and the editor dashboard are built using Next.js, Typescript, Tailwind, and Vercel. For the masonry, we first tried a few libraries (such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-masonry-css) but ended up writing our own because all the libraries we tried didn't handle proper column-height distribution.
Anything else you're curious about?
- inferred/corrected geotags
- inferred/corrected time of day
- names or at least UUIDs or something of people in each photo
Maybe the last one (faces/people) isn't even possible, if they don't reify found people into some actual tag or something, maybe you just have to search by person and gphotos just shows you the photos with embeddings less than some cutoff cosine distance from that person's embedding.
But who are your target audience? How is this different from sharing a public album link?
I've spent way too much time messing around with layouts for image galleries with different aspect ratio photos. Looks like you're using a masonry layout. Any thoughts on masonry vs something like flickr's layout?
Similar idea on paper. May be useful to compare how theirs works since that could be a competitor of sorts.
Typo here “Show your art, keep friends up-to-date or share family photos with lode ones.”