Will we ever have..

[srijith]

a service like this? http://code.flickr.com/

[goislands]

a service like this? http://code.flickr.com/

Hi:

so what precisely do you suggest? Which service do you mean? Personally I find flickr a horrible system with one of worst possible presentation for the images, and this is what counts. I see no motivation at all to deal with flickr. Of course, I might be disappointed with non responsive customer service here at pBase, but this has never diminished my admiration to this site as the way of presenting images.

Thomas

[srijith]

Thomas, did you even visit the page I linked? Or did you compose the reply just by seeing flickr.com in the URL? The page I linked to gives details of the APIs flickr expose for developers to write plugins for Wordpress, Photoshop, Lightroom etc.

Ever wondered why there is no easy way to upload to PBase from your machine, backup images etc.? Blame it on the lack of clean documented APIs to do so! I have no love lost for flickr but you got to give points where they are due.

[srijith]

http://photobucket.com/developer/

[goislands]

Thomas, did you even visit the page I linked? Or did you compose the reply just by seeing flickr.com in the URL? The page I linked to gives details of the APIs flickr expose for developers to write plugins for Wordpress, Photoshop, Lightroom etc.

Ever wondered why there is no easy way to upload to PBase from your machine, backup images etc.? Blame it on the lack of clean documented APIs to do so! I have no love lost for flickr but you got to give points where they are due.

Oh man, yes I did "even" visited this page. Even more: I looked if I would like to have an account, because my ancient images were still with Yahoo, they shut down their service pointing to flickr. Thank you for asking so nicely.

If the attraction are the plugins, as you explain it between the lines, I am most decisively not interested, I consider this an error in concept. An image hosting site should host images, and not attempt to perform tasks dedicated to an OS or to an image processing utility. In engineering its being called "orthogonality." Another saying is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." I can zip images on a mouse click. I can select the zip file at Pbase for an efficient batch operation. I need nothing more for upload itself. As always, your mileage may vary, and as it seems you perceive a sort of lack of upload function at Pbase. Hm...

I would wish from Pbase rather for little simple things, asked here before many times, like avoiding that ".type" will become a part of image name. The infamous "thousand time del, del, del, del" on every each image... If I only could get that time of my life spend on "del del del del" given back to me, I would have bought a toy for my granddaughter and played with her.

Backup, yes, I see a deficit. I would like to be able to store my caption, for example.

More little things instead of some heavy development "plugins" would be rather a better EXIF support, user control of compression in auto-sized images at pBase, but we spoke about that so many times here...

I am living in a software industry by myself, and many marketing gimmicks, even in my own company, upset me as an enduser. Have you seen how often installed programs "steal" file suffixes from each other, to name one Windows plague of our time?

Some of these products attempt also to be "swiss army knife," lets stay with Lightroom, which installs a nasty program apdproxy.exe and runs it in background without user's permission. The function of this service is to upload images as soon you plug in a CF or SD card into your computer. But you might have a different function for your CF card, not related to photography at all. For me such solution is an abomination, the program is bigger, more difficult to maintain, and it merely dups a functionality available anyway. With every such "clever" side-function the OS changes its behavior, what confuses less "computer savvy users." For example my wife might call me than and say something along the lines: "the computer opened than ABC, but I did not started it, is it broken?" etc. etc. I prefer to access the card or any other external device by myself in a way I prefer. Orthogonality, simplicity, focus on the task at hand. Our contemporary software is too big, too complex, too unreliable. I prefer a small Pbase, easy to use, focussed on the hosting and its efficiency.

Thomas

[larena]

I'm with srijith on this one.

As the Feature Requests forum shows, there will always be features people want but aren't currently available. PBase developers (or the developers of any software, for that matter) only have a certain amount of time and resources, which they need to dedicate to those areas that will have the biggest impact. This means bug fixes and enhancements that they believe will be beneficial to the largest number of users.

If an API set is released, then the users themselves are able to add in features that might only be of use to a few people. For instance, I have a Topfield PVR. Topfield made APIs available, so users of the device have written a whole lot of applications that add new functionality, and even some bug fixes. Many users have benefitted from the voluntary work done by a few owners of this PVR, and Topfield gained a really good reputation because of this.

Just imagine what some creative developers could provide to PBase - for free!

[srijith]

An image hosting site should host images, and not attempt to perform tasks dedicated to an OS or to an image processing utility. In engineering its being called "orthogonality." Another saying is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." I can zip images on a mouse click. I can select the zip file at Pbase for an efficient batch operation. I need nothing more for upload itself. As always, your mileage may vary, and as it seems you perceive a sort of lack of upload function at Pbase.

An image hosting site should make it easier to upload pictures as seemlessly as possible. If I am working in PS or Lightroom or any other software, I should be able to click an option within the software to upload it. Having to zip the files, open the browser, surf to PBase upload site, click on the upload button, select the correct file, wait for it to be uploaded etc. is not the most seemless way possible.

I would wish from Pbase rather for little simple things, asked here before many times, like avoiding that ".type" will become a part of image name. The infamous "thousand time del, del, del, del" on every each image... If I only could get that time of my life spend on "del del del del" given back to me, I would have bought a toy for my granddaughter and played with her.

Sure, would be great if PBase could do that too. Actually if they had open APIs, I could even be able to write an app that implements some of these 'simple things' and not having to wait till PBase has the manpower to do it all themselves.

Backup, yes, I see a deficit. I would like to be able to store my caption, for example.

When you say 'store my caption', I am assuming you must be referring to the PBgrab tool written by Arjun? If so, I think it proves my point. Arjun was able to write the tool because PBase, as of now, exposes the gallery structure as XML data. Slug did this after couple of us, including yours truly, suggested this to him. The same is the case with the PBaseUpload I wrote.

More little things instead of some heavy development "plugins" would be rather a better EXIF support, user control of compression in auto-sized images at pBase, but we spoke about that so many times here...

That is the beauty of exposing these APIs. The plugins get written by the users. PBase guys themselves do not have to do this. They just need to expose some documented services.

Some of these products attempt also to be "swiss army knife," lets stay with Lightroom, which installs a nasty program apdproxy.exe and runs it in background without user's permission. The function of this service is to upload images as soon you plug in a CF or SD card into your computer. But you might have a different function for your CF card, not related to photography at all. For me such solution is an abomination, the program is bigger, more difficult to maintain, and it merely dups a functionality available anyway.

But how about someone who wants that functionality since the only time he plugs in the CF card is to trx. the pics from the camera. What you wish for is the option to turn off the apdproxy daemon/service. Sure, that would be a good thing.

[goislands]

I think that this is an interesting discussion. Certainly WEB is a dynamic creation and possibilities for its evolution are endless. Maybe I am getting too old for the rapid change? Being now suddenly a grandparent, am I just feeling plain and simple happy with what I have, whereas younger "sturm and drang" generation seeks for the inevitable progress to be made? We will surely not see eye to eye on the upload issue! I am happy with upload, except that EXIF should be also replaced when an image will be replaced.

Aside of all such considerations, I wish that Pbase team would be more efficient in collecting wish lists and implementing them based on time effort. What problem is it to remove the ".type" at any convenience, to come back to the same example? This might have been done in 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007, or maybe now, before Summer, please? Its less work than a plugin API, like 5min worth of work? Why do we have to wait for years for it?

I think that me and my team are good at such things, because we like the accolade of customers, who like to feel to be listen to. Its a little investment of man power with a great benefit. Pbase team appears very unresponsive and self contained at times. Of all the Pbase extensions made here in recent whopping 2-3 years only a few were on my wish list, the rest is for me a "Hm... what is that" kind of thing. That's a fact I have to digest somehow. Am I "out of the groove?" Am I a potato eater whereas the nation wants tomato?

Thomas

[dang]

Thomas said:

Maybe I am getting too old for the rapid change?

Me too! But... what's been rapid on Pbase?

I've already witnessed what people with more knowledge than I ever hope to acquire are able to implement without having access. Many of the features now available were originally in use, and shared by them before supported addition, which has made Pbase a much nicer community. Even if APIs weren't public, it would seem in the best interest of Admin (and the community in general) to allow a few requesting access the ability.

While most people aren't going to make use of APIs, the few who could are offering to help fix problems for free, and add new function. Doesn't sound like a bad thing to me, especially when reading other threads. They're usually saying time lines can't be given for fixes because so many things are being worked on. Seems counterproductive when so much could be dealt with by Srijith, & others, thus lessening the load.

Hopefully admin will reconsider.