Be Excellent To Each Other

Righty ho fella-me-lads and lasses. Hope ye are all doing dandy, for I require your assistance.

As ye may know by now, I recently got married, and anyone who has been through that experience knows full well the number of photos which are taken. My good lady wife wants to be able to stuff with photos on-line, with the following requirements:

Multiple file upload (possibly even folder upload)
on-line sharing
multpile person upload
high quality download (therefore, HQ upload)
a large storage capacity (>10Gig would be good)
Not (linked to) facebook.

Anyone have any ideas, looked at Picasa, but doesn't seem to fit the bill.

Thank you all.

Flickr? You can have folders, sets, sets within sets... there's multiple uliads and a really good desktop uploader. You can also create a group, open pup my or only via invite and get guests to upload their own pictures of the day. Free and pro accounts available.

Why don't wedding photographers offer this as part of their service?

Because many still own the copyright and only recently have they started letting you have the digi files.

Alternatively, I wouldn't trust the only online repositary for my photos being Jim teh Photographer, who could disappear (with the site) overnight.

Oh! Multiple uliads is pretty good.

yeah, flickr seems to be abuot the best, but is a faff to invite people to the groups, as you need to know their flickr account to invite them if they already have one.

Or pay for a flickr account just for your wedding stuff and give your family and friends the log in details.

if you have a btinternet e-mail address (does not matter if you are still with them) then you get pro on flicker for free.

You misunderstand; I'm not talking about their own photos. I mean a place for your guests to upload all their pictures. With a "download all" button, to alleviate your backup concern.

Oooh, thanks, I am on BT. Is it automatic if you register with a BT address?

Possibly the same reason though. If Photographer is charging you £xbig per print, he really doesn't want to create an area which could see your guests uploading better photos with no rake for him.

Nah, I doubt they'd be better, at least not for the sort of formal group shots you count on the pro for.

I don't necessarily think he'd be right to think that, just that he could.

Shut up, you

Not necessarily, you don't HAVE to make the group invite only, and I think the likelihood of a stranger uploading their cat pictures to the group are quite low. Any unwanted photos are easily removed if anyone does upload the wrong thing. Otherwise, as someone said, a single account the log-in of which you can share with family and friends.

yarp.

</unlurk>

So...

I teamed up with my business partner to build this exact service after hearing several couples ask for it, and after investigating the popular existing collaborative upload/sharing tools.

We launched weddingtales.co.uk last month.

It features:
A multiple file uploader.
A gallery for you and your guests to browse (both most recent, and also as a timeline - so everybody's photos should integrate well together).
Easy access - your guest uploaders/viewers don't need to supply any details to us, or download anything extra to get going.
Privacy - Everything is secured behind a shared password.
We store the full-size uploaded versions, which we collate and send to you (currently on a DVD).

There's a couple of neat surprises to come soon for the service, but that's the core of it.

Please take a look at the website. If you have any questions; just ask.
If you're interested in using it then throw me a message- I'd be very happy to offer a discount code in return for some feedback.

That's some good stuff.
The only thing missing that I couldn't see was a demo account so I could see what it looked like on the "inside".

Thanks

You're dead right!
We're considering a couple of options for that. We'll probably throw up a quick video showing it in action until we get the chance to code in a proper interactive demo.

Looks pretty good, but I have no idea about cost, and couldn't find anything about prices. Is it free? I assume a cost is involved somewhere...

Yep, that's another thing we need to work on. The price is currently listed on the inside of the site, which isn't too helpful (we're tech nerds, and still getting to grips with the niceties of marketing...).

We've pitched at £40 upfront, including six months hosting (which can be extended if required) and DVD posted to you within the UK.

We're working hard to bolt-in some sweet photo mementos- from the typical fare [prints, photo albums, etc.] to the more exotic [currently under wraps]. These will be available as optional extras to both wedding couple and guests.

As I say, we're keen to sharpen this as much as possible for our users, so anyone who has a wedding event approaching or recently passed and is a genuine BEEXer, please drop me a line. If you're willing to give feedback then I'd happily offer a discount.

That sounds like a good site, I'll try harder to get a proposal now so as I can try it out

Fab!

We kicked off a blog to collate some spectacular wedding-related imagery (for engagees and engagees-to-be). We're also on Twitter if that's your bag.

Anyway, I'm in danger of abusing this thread with my pimping. Any specific questions then ask away or message me.

Don't worry about pimping... this is useful pimping. Pimp away!

(not quite a pimp outfit, but it'll do for now!).

Seems like a really good idea, Skykid!

If the idea takes off might you consider offering a re-touching service where couples can pick their favourite of their guests photos to get minor retouches on colour balancing, etc? Just an idea, might not be a good one.

Thanks Mimi.

We're drilling down on making the system very scalable - so trying to make everything as automated as possible. There are some web-based services that we might be able to hook into for basic colour balancing by our users as a quick win for that.

I don't think we'd want to have the overhead of a retouch team ourselves, but you raise an interesting angle - there's certainly scope to build an ecosystem of 'retouchers-for-hire' into the system at some point in the future. Maybe for personalised photo-based craft things too? That's food for thought... much appreciated! Will discuss with my co-founder next week.

Yeah, it was just an idea. I know that some places like Photobox used to offer basic re-touching (removal of red eyes, etc) for a few pounds per photo. Expensive for normal snaps, but perhaps something people might spend money on due to it being pictures of their big day. Anyway, good luck with the site!

I'm off to a wedding in a month, I'd be interested in giving this to them as a gift if mrs t approves . It seems a good idea and a bit different to a toaster!

Mimi- Our [hippie] attitude is that there are no bad ideas- everything has some sort of value (actually, that's not totally true- we've come up with some shockers ourselves!).
We've got a big list of potential features scrawled on the office wall... part of the reason why building a business like this is really exciting. I can see a feature like you're suggesting being very useful to some people- if we can find a good way of making it scalable and of consistent, good standard then it could well be worth the focus to build. Thanks again

Trooper- Excellent, sir. One of our aims is to hit a gift price-point- be sure to give me a shout if you'd like to give it a go.
Ultimately, we hope people will be setting up their photo events as early as possible, so they can chronicle more than just the things that happen on the day- though we just have to wait and see what people respond to.

You need smartphone apps, too. For easy submission of photos from people's phone cameras.

It's really nice to see a good idea like this making it live.

The "tales" part of the name makes me think you'd end up with more like a scrapbook / annotated album format rather than simply a folder full of photos. Is that the case?

That's one of the highest priorities for us. I built some proof of concept iPhone code a few months back and am just about to return to it. I feel like kicking Apple in the pips for disabling both form uploads and Flash. We may release an upload by email mechanism in the meantime to offer an imperfect, but usable solution. We've got some leads for dev on the other platforms too.

Defo- there's a few cute interactive things that phone apps could add to the party in time


Thanks! It's been an amazing journey so far. We were privileged to be accepted onto a business acceleration scheme to help out- which offered us a little seed capital, some amazing mentor-type people to talk to and nine other exciting teams to share an office with (more info: The Difference Engine / also see spiritual sister Springboard). We started the year with a very basic proof of concept prototype and a big bag of enthusiasm. I'd highly recommend these sorts of scheme to anyone with the beginnings of a good tech idea, open mind and lack of ties- it's certainly changed the way I think.


Currently: sort of; in the near future: very much so. As I mentioned, we pull the timestamp data from everybody's photographs and integrate them together, which produces a neat timeline (it's a pretty basic thing, but it made our mouths do 'O' shapes when we first tried it). For the future, we're targeting a few things - both physical goods and on-site gadgets - that will help people contextualise and add some narrative.

this does sound lovely, can i already inform a couple which will wed in august?

You should also pitch to pro wedding photographers. Sell them a voucher code for, say, 60% of your normal price; let them sell that on to their customers for 80% of the normal price (or bundle it in with their other services). You reach a bigger audience, they get a perk to make people choose them over competitors, and they get a small kickback on the fee too.

Of course, please do! We're launched and ready. If they want to take it earlier, they could upload bits and pieces to do with the wedding, each other, invite early submissions from friends and make sure all the details are on invites.


There are some interesting reseller propositions. We're keen to try and avoid the trad marketing routes as much as possible, because for the wedding industry these carry big price-tags; which ultimately gets passed on to the consumer. So, 'middle-men', such as the pro photographer bridge the gap nicely for us.

We gave a trial to one pro recently; afterwards he said, hyperbolically (and a bit tongue-in-cheek) that we'd be putting him out of business- but it worked out very well. He put our details on his cards along with his own and found that people were much more keen to take them (folk are a bit wary about the upsell from wedding photographers). Result: the couple collected a fat chunk of photos from friends and he got more traffic to his site- there is a genuine value-add on all three sides.

So yeah, you're absolutely right regarding what you said earlier. They're a different kind of snap- friends taking pictures of friends, which doesn't compete directly with the formal shots.
We're keen to talk with any pro wedding photographers about these kind of relationships if anyone knows any?

Actually I know where they all hang out. http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/ (FF hates the site) there is a business section but the best thing to do is PM the admin and he will give permission for you to advertise the one of the trade sections. They will probably want you to do a discount for advertising on the site - also they do have banner space for sale.

Thanks, Decca- will investigate!

Sorry skykid, I haven't been ignoring you, we are just trying to figure out how many of our friends have photos we haven't got to see if it worth paying for a service.
On a marketing front, I think you need to get this to people before they are married so they can tell everyone about it, it might encuorage a few more photos, but also it is easy to discard £40 in the wedding build-up, but after the honeymoon, money seems a lot tighter! I have a couple of friends getting married in the next year, I shall mention it to them.

Good point. We're hoping the service will help some people retrospectively- though it is likely to be a bit lower on the priority list