http://getinapic.com<p>What is InaPic?: Photo sharing + Image recognition.
InaPic gives you photo albums with multiple collaborators. It then automatically organizes thousands of photos contributed by tens of users. This is accomplished by state-of-the-art image recognition technology. Clutter is removed by stacking repeating pictures, and highlights are created with a single click, which can seamlessly be shared on a more open forum such as Facebook or Flickr.<p>I invite you to check InaPic's self-organizing photo albums on getinapic.com. Some of the features mentioned above are currently being built so this is a dry demo of how it would look like. The shown results are created completely automatically, though. I am posting it early because I want your honest feedback!<p>Why InaPic?: So many photos, so less time. We believe, technology should assist in organizing our photos (say, by backdrop, by people, and by place). We should be able to tag photos in a bunch (stacks created by image matching). We should be able to search them by content. Also, we do activities in groups, then why do we have lonely albums? On-the-fly group albums is the InaPic's way. Please see the about page for brief description on our beliefs: http://getinapic.com/about<p>But why InaPic, really?: One day we will surely have technology seamlessly organize our photo albums. Why not now? Why not by us?<p>Here's my story: When I left my job about an year back I knew nothing about how to do startups. Heck, I didn't even know about hacker news. Flashback to early 2010: With a PhD in image processing/information hiding, I was happily researching and hacking computer vision projects for DARPA and Navy. Then one day it struck me: What am I doing that's creating value to the world? Am I doing anything worthwhile that could justify my time, effort, and even my salary? This feeling stayed in me for good 6-9 months. (I think) I am fairly respected in academia for my research contributions (>400 citations). So I thought of moving to academia. But the urge to build something useful overpowered my fears of uncertainty, and with support from my wonderful wife, I decided to leave my job to do a startup. The goal was to build a consumer startup around computer vision and image analysis. The first thing we built was LinkaPic (http://linkapic.com) a mobile visual search engine that would be the wikipedia for the real world. After a few months of struggling to market the idea, I realized that it is too broad and too vague for greater market adoption. Then came the depression. After struggling for a couple of months almost doing nothing, came the pivot. Using the same technology, we set out to build InaPic, and here I am, posting this, exactly 300 days after I signed up for hacker news.<p>Lastly, are you a python/django and/or javascript hacker and love InaPic so much as to want to join me in building it? Please send me an email (address in my profile).