Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

My buddy Allen Stern (of CenterNetworks) said something recently in a podcast that I liked and is relevant here. Paraphrasing, he said something like, "In New York City there are a thousand pizza places and new ones opening up all the time. Many of them are successful and some of the new ones will be, too."

Or, in other words, there is always room for new startups that do the same thing. Just do it better or differently -- have better crust, better toppings, faster delivery, free breadsticks, etc.

As you said, "there are always people who are looking for a better solution." You just need to make it.

I think photo-sharing services need to verticalize and create niches.

I see a clear case for a photo-sharing service specifically designed to host high-resolution images (big size) images which are rapidly becoming the norm with higher resolution cameras rolling out.

What would it take:

1. Uploading will take more time. Should happen in the background. 2. Browsing can be made better - by showing reduced resolutions on the fly - zooming out on parts etc.

A lot of users want to share their photos and are blissfully unaware of FaceBook/Flickr.

You said it yourself:

>But there are always people who are looking for a better solution.

Don't dive straight in, work out what users want that flickr/etc doesn't offer - and do that.

Yeah, it's tough when facebook is becoming the default for everyone uploading their pictures. If facebook expands that aspect of their business it might hard between them and flickr already being huge.

Sam seems to think so and apparently YC agreed with him (well, maybe): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453303

It seems hard to believe now, but when Google started, some people wondered "why another search engine?", since Yaho and Altavista had that market "locked up".

So yes, there is room for another photo sharing service.

flickr etc = images + community... so go create images + technology.

that photo stuff we hear about from time to time, like face recognition or stitching together photos or turning them into videos or building 3d models of landmarks from tons of user photos... are any of those on photo sharing site yet?

I think it really depends on if you're talking about a completely consumer/snapshot sharing service that is free. If so, I would say "no". Facebook and Flickr dominate and (to my knowledge) neither make money solely on their photo services. (Facebook's only revenue is ads and I doubt Flickr's Pro account covers the cost of the entire service).

If you're talking about a premium/freemium service that is targeted at pro-sumers, then maybe. SmugMug and others (myself included) have shown that it can be done profitably. It's just that with a paid service, you reduce your market considerably (no one wants to pay to upload their halloween party pictures).

But I think there are new markets to explore for paid services. Just depends on who you're trying to reach.

There is always room for better solutions. Think about Google...there were other search engines around when Google was launched but where are they now. If you can deliver a better solution always go for it.

I'd like a service that in one way made photos second class entities, and in another way treated them as the be all and end all.

I want the hires, the digital negative, to be able to pair a digital negative and a jpg... so that's the first class stuff.

But I want the current attributes of a photo on Flickr to be first class... time and place matter. In fact, a photo is an attribute of a moment in time. And so it should figure out when multiple people upload based on a shared event that the uploads are happening at the same place, and it should then work out from the timestamps when it was, so if anyone adds a geotag all matching files are implicitly tagged unless overridden.

I want to search photos like tineye.com does... provide a photo as a search token. I want to find "similar" photos to the one I have... did someone link to a photo that belongs to a set, how do I get back to that set? How do I widen the search to find other photos from the event?

I want to be able to get the original or negative, regardless of the size, if it's a CC image.

I want to be able to background upload. If the images are local, then they're magically going to be published too.

I'd like an auto image stitcher for lo-fi gigapan-ish images... select the ones to be stitched and go for it.

Lots of things really. There's so much room still.

Yes, but you need to find a way to do picture sharing better. What would differentiate your startup from flickr or photobucket? A tie in to all the networking sites where you upload your photo once and they show up in all of your networks might be a big win, I don't know.

You can always find room in the market for a better mousetrap, provided you have a good idea of how the mousetrap needs to be improved.

What I'd like (and what I'd build if I had more spare time & mental capacity) is a photo-hosting service driven by a Flickr-like API, but designed to be an intelligent "asset store" for photos so large sites or communities can use this service as their photo storage & hosting back-end. The service itself wouldn't need much of a UI and users of sites/systems that depend on the service wouldn't necessarily know their photos are there.

I imagine this working something like S3 except that it knows about images, so it can process/resize them (and provide APIs to control such things) and also include a bundled CDN service (CloudFront). The pieces are all there but an API that made it really easy to put images in, process them and get them out again would save a lot of time.

(I manage a high traffic blog network and am spec'ing out some image-heavy niche web apps/sites. I'm eventually going to have to build something like this for internal use -- wish I could just buy in now).

of course there is. even the biggest photo sharing sites like Flickr have less than 1% of market share of internet users, plenty of space to go in.

Also you have to remember that its a standalone service, so users will get value from day 1. So just throw up a good looking user interface and first time users will sign up to try it out

There are probably a lot more of these sites out there than the "big ones". I estimate in the tens, but possible 100+. I'd spend a few days enumerating and categorizing the competition in terms of approach taken, features, etc. learning what their Google footprint is, whether they're mentioned in blogs, what Alexa says about them, etc. This would give you a better picture about what your chances of success are. Without actually doing this research, I'd say it's a crowded segment, so your chances of succeeding are probably relatively low. I'd wait for a better idea / differentiator.

Good luck!

Seems like niche specific sites like twitpic.com can do pretty well...

Yes, there is a room. For example, I myself still didn't found an "ultimate" sharing site for myself. I use Google picasaweb, because I like the integration with the Picasa client, but I miss the social features. I can have those on flickr, but on the other site, the free option in flickr is rather limited and there is not a seamless integration with a good client.

The fact that a lot of your friends are not happy with the existing solutions should be an indicator that there is potential for a new photo sharing site. I think, "photo sharing" includes a lot of different, sometimes very specific use-cases implying different devices that could be explicitly supported. The answer is clearly: yes!

It would have to stand out clearly as there is so much competition from big and small players out there.

I think there is definitely room - in niche markets like traditional advertising where photos and other artwork comes from multiple sources, and where automation can really save money for your clients.