My little brother got married a few weeks ago.

There were, of course, at least a dozen different people taking pictures of the festivities on their digital cameras.

Now the happy couple (and their family and friends) want to see all those photos.

I’ve been asked to make some space available on my web server for hosting those photos. But no one has taken advantage of it yet, because the whole process would be a big hassle.

Even if I already had some gallery software on my website, how would all of the photos get online? Should I give everyone FTP credentials? What about my parents? They don’t know how to operate an FTP client.

Sure, they could upload all the photos through a browser interface, but that’s a big hassle, since they’d have to individually click on a BROWSE button for every single photo. Considering how many photos were taken at this wedding, they could easily spend an hour or more, just uploading photos.

Not a chance.

Imagine this scenario, though:

• My brother creates an account on a photo-sharing website. He includes the email addresses of all his family and friends.
• An email gets sent to each person on his list. The email includes a link to download and install a tiny piece of client-side software.
• The client-side software puts an icon onto each user’s desktop.
• To upload photos to the website, a user just drags-and-drops an image file (or an entire folder full of image files, or a zip file containing images) onto the desktop icon.
• The client-side application opens an FTP connection to the server, sending all of the photos to the server, where a new album is created in the gallery.
• On the server, the image is re-sized twice (once to create a thumbnail, and once to create a comfortable display onscreen). All images are annotated with the name of the person who uploaded them.
• An email notification gets sent out to all other members of this gallery, letting them know that new photos have been uploaded. The email includes a link to the new gallery.
• On the gallery/album pages, users can add their own captions and comments. They can also vote for their favorite photos, as well as ordering prints from online photo-finishers.

Nice, huh?

The entire user experience would consist of drag-dropping files. Everything else would be taken care of by the software.

I’d use it.

And, more importantly, everyone in my family could use it, too. My parents are tech-savvy enough to have email accounts and to drag-drop files, but I’d never expect them to use an FTP client. This would be perfect for them.

Market Considerations

Sharing photos amongst a group of people is still too technical for most people. Reducing the entire process to a simple drag-and-drop operation would vastly simplify the process. This level of simplicity would be very appealing to a huge segment of the population.

In addition, the service could probably be offered for free, charging people only when they order physical prints of pictures (which most people still like to have, especially for weddings and other family events).

Technical Considerations

The drag-and-drop functionality would be simple to implement. The client-side application would just be a specialized FTP client (and actually, it would make a lot of sense to perform all computationally-intensive image-resizing operations on the client) and a desktop shortcut.

The only significant technical obstacle would be on the server-side, making sure to have enough disk space to accommodate thousands of image uploads. Maybe it would be a good idea to limit the free storage of images to 30 days, thereby encouraging users to share their photos and order prints quickly, before they start getting charged for data storage.

Pros:

• It’s a very simple concept. Easy to explain to people. Easy to demonstrate value.
• Straightforward business plan: free temporary image hosting, with a really intuitive multi-user upload interface. People pay for prints.
• Relatively simple to implement.

Cons:

• Could require a lot of server-side storage space. It’s difficult to predict the ratio of photos-uploaded to prints-ordered, so it’s difficult to predict how much disk space would be required in order to generate a particular amount of revenue.

…

This is the fourteenth of 30 business ideas that I’ll be writing about over the course of 30 days. Some of them aim to solve complex computational problems. Others attempt only to simplify processes that would otherwise be frustratingly complex to average computer users. One of them will become a product over the next six months, and the foundation of my new software business.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 4:49 pm and is filed under biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.