Hey HN!
My friend and I love taking pictures on our phones, and we were looking for a super simple way to share them with the world. Google Photos albums are nice, but the result isn't slick enough and lacks customization options (embed, custom domain).<p>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.<p>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 <i>technically</i> it takes 60 seconds to build a website doesn't take into account that you have to spend time picking the right images.<p>Would love to some feedback/ideas from hobbyist photographers here!
My mom is an avid traveler who takes a ton of photos and puts them on albums she then shares with the family, and a while ago she was asking if I had a solution so she could have a website where all her albums are listed. She wanted to not have to share a new link each time, and have people easily look up older ones.<p>I didn't have any easy solution and this looks promising, congrats!<p>A few dealbreaker things I can share:<p>- she has lots of albums already on gphoto. She'd need to easily import them.<p>- 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.<p>- she doesn't have a ton of videos but sometimes she does have a few.<p>- 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.<p>- 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).<p>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).<p>Anyway, just sharing my use case in case that's useful but congrats on launching and on the good looking product!
Great website and the pricing makes sense. Some links still go to gphotos.site (automatic redirected). I tried so see how easy the iframe feature is, or rather if a non-technical person would understand the documentation. But the guides seem to be mostly AI generated SEO. Quickly the good impression of personal photos from genuine authors of the website turned into gen-AI slob <a href="https://www.myphotos.site/platforms/wordpress" rel="nofollow">https://www.myphotos.site/platforms/wordpress</a>
Have you looked into row-based presentation of the images? I usually feel like pages with row-based image grids have a higher-quality look to them.<p>See e.g. [1] and [2] for more info and [3] for an implementation.<p>[1]: <a href="https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/google-design/google-photos-45b714dfbed1</a>
[2]: <a href="https://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/google-plus-layout-find-best-breaks.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.vjeux.com/2014/image/google-plus-layout-find-be...</a>
[3]: <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-photo-gallery" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-photo-gallery</a>
I often use Photos album link sharing option. Have never tried to embed in in an existing page, is that the problem it is solving at the moment (and relocating the images though I am not sure what that entails in terms of usage rights)? I must have missed something otherwise.
Reminds me of a 13 year old GitHub project back when Google Photos was called Picasa:<p><a href="https://github.com/alanhamlett/jQuery-Picasa-Gallery">https://github.com/alanhamlett/jQuery-Picasa-Gallery</a>
If user delete photos on Google side, are they also removed from your service? And also what's the retention of user data on your service once I cancel my account?
One of the things I would want included is any and all metadata / tags that Google Photos adds to photos. For instance:<p><pre><code> - inferred/corrected geotags
- inferred/corrected time of day
- names or at least UUIDs or something of people in each photo
</code></pre>
I almost typed another bullet along the lines of "the top 10 most-likely features identified in the photo", like if it's a photo of a menu or a tower or whatever, then "menu" / "tower", but, it's probably encoded as some kind of embedding in some space like word2vec or something less ancient, and it wouldn't even really be that useful for them to give out the raw embedded through the API, would it?<p>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.
Hi great idea! I was also trying to build something similar for photographers!<p>But who are your target audience? How is this different from sharing a public album link?
Awesome nice work!<p>Does this work for video?<p>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.
Really good execution! I was definitely looking for something like this - so great job in working on a real problem.<p>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?
Well done launching! I had a quick look at the example site linked in the footer and I like it.<p>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?
Something to consider, adobe Lightroom has a feature coupled with adobe portfolio (iirc that's the name of the product) where if you use Lightroom you can turn albums into sites.<p>Similar idea on paper. May be useful to compare how theirs works since that could be a competitor of sorts.
Sorry to be critical but $15/m before allowing custom domain is not a good value IMO, that's right up there with squarespace and they'll register the domain for me at that price<p>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<p><a href="https://support.google.com/business/answer/https://support.google.com/business/answer/14368911?hl=en?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/business/answer/https://support.g...</a>
Reminds me of one of my earliest Ruby on Rails apps, some 14 years ago: Using the flickr api, the whole app white-labelled for custom domains etc... never got any traction.
probably entirely google's fault, but I can't seem to pick a folder when I'm brought to the google photos search box. it only finds individual photos
very cool. last year I made similar for Apple Photos(but it's on pause now).<p><a href="https://public.photos" rel="nofollow">https://public.photos</a>
the website itself looks very Template-y, now if that’s not of concern just ignore I said anything but that’s always what comes to mind when I visit a new website, like anecdotally I also hate it when a website has gone the whole extra mile to customize their website and then you check out and see the monotonous, bland things that are the stripe checkout buttons & page. Don’t get me wrong, I get why from a backend perspective, totally. It’s just takes you out of the whole immersion in the website (design)
Looks awesome, and will help quick galleries to be created.<p>I wanted to build something similar, but at that time photos did not expose APIs to get list of photos.<p>What was your work around? Or have they opened up the APIs now?