Bug report: I've copy-pasted an image file from my desktop and that's what a got: http://pasteboard.co/1345297649815178.png (that's an OSX default thumbnail image, not my image file). Chrome 20 @ OSX 10.6.8
Copying actual image files in OSX (instead of image data) gives that thumbnail. You're actually not supposed to be able to copy and paste files at all, since I don't think there is any way for me to access the data in the file through the clipboard. I believe OSX is alone in putting thumbnails in the clipboard when copying files.
This might be a bit confusing, I'm going to have to figure out how to make this more clear to the user.
Not sure the following is part of your usecase, but you may want to consider it.
First off, you might want to add something that indicates what kind of images are "valid". For example, I would love a site like yours where I could post my RAW CR2 files. While those are rarely good exactly like they are, they can be useful to show someone as an example of unretouched work, or as a guide to where I'm starting for someone to indicate "yes, but I really wanted you to get an angle looking from the south".
Second, I would love to have your service or some other one where I can pay a semi-ridiculous fee, and know the same image will still be available in 10 years. Right now I have about 1TB of images, and I wonder if anyone would bother to even look through them before just deleting the directory if I weren't around. It would be nice to know they are still somewhere. My current "workaround" is to post images to one of my blogs that I know Archive.Org backs up.
Your first use case seems perfect for Dropbox... just share a link to the specific files in question.
The second use case, I'm unaware of anything that legally provides that guarantee (i.e. with an SLA), but if you trust that Amazon will be around for 10 years, you could just sign up for an AWS account and put the images on S3 yourself. I'd put more stock (literally and figuratively) in Amazon than Archive.org for data reliability.
The current limit on image size is 10MB, so posting large raw image files won't be possible here.
The purpose of this app is to provide a quick way for people to share their images, so the use case you describe does not really align with the goals that I have. I'm sure there are services that are better suited for what you want to do.
I like the UI and it seems pretty nice.
But under Firefox the image does not upload at first (stays a 00%). I first have to cancel and reclick Upload for it to work.
When I'm on a website and right-click -> copy Image, its says nothing is in my clipboard, I first have to paste it in Paint and copy it again for it to work on the site, is it a bug or am I misunderstanding how the clipboard works (I'm under Win7)?
When you generate the URL, it would be great if it was clickable or at least a button to go to the image. I understand the goal is for the user to have a URL to share so copying may be more important that clicking.
Do you plan to add the ability to delete a picture? I don't see a button anywhere to do so, and no info on how long you keep the data. Will you apply a policy like pastebin for text?
Anyway it's really an easy way to share a picture with someone, hope you'll add features!
Does this upload bug happen every time? There are still some weird bugs that I haven't figured out how to solve yet since they are hard to recreate. I'll keep working on that though.
About the copying images from a website: See my answer to arkitaip.
I'm considering adding a clickable link as well under the generated URL, that might actually be useful.
If I were to implement the ability to delete a picture, I would have to add some kind of user authentication which I'm not planning on doing at this moment. It might be possible to put some kind of secret client ID in the users localStorage to allow them to delete their own images, but I would have to make sure it can't be exploited so that other people can delete your images. Feel free to leave suggestions on how you could do this without requiring user accounts.
I would like to be able to store the images forever, but if the costs of doing so becomes to much for me to handle, I'm going to have to reconsider that.
I'm definitely planning on adding more features to the app, but one of the strong points of it is that it's very clean and simple at what it tries to do, so it's important that I don't try to add too much to it.
Strangely the bug does not seem to appear anymore sorry I cannot give you more info on this now.
A clickable link or maybe a button with an image representing "Go to" action!
Storing images forever seems really hard and costly wouldn't it? Especially if you don't limit the original image size or resize it on your server.
For deletion of the image a solution could be to do like doodle.com. You provide one "administration link" where the uploading user can resize/crop/change the image, and a "publishing link" that he can provide to over people to see ?
A quick share through twitter/FB/G+ etc of the image uploaded could be nice too and help spread the word!
I currently limit the image size to 10MB, but even with that I guess storage space could quickly become a problem. A 30 day expiration time might be needed to keep the costs down.
Giving an additional administration link is a possibility, but I'll have to put some more thought into what the best way to handle image deletion / editing would be.
Pretty damn cool. On Firefox, though, I can't drag and drop an image straight from another webpage, or choose "Copy Image" in FF then paste - in both cases it says either "not an image file" (if I drag an image) or "Your clipboard has no image" (if I CTRL+V after copying an image), and doesn't work.
This is an interesting case because I've always wondered how users interact with drag and drop ui in the browsers. Are users accustomed to the concept or does it confuse them because traditionally browsers haven't supported drag and drop? I bet there a risk for a conflict in the user's mental models!
I wonder how drag and drop would compare to the traditional approach to upload images:
1. click the Browse Image button
2. Locate images
3. Select Images
4. OK image selection
Like I said, would love to see some stats on browser drag and drop.
EDIT: Using Chrome, I tried to drag and drop an image on a web site to Pasteboard and it didn't work. Kinda obvious since it's a clipboard object but it would be really cool if it worked (not sure why you would like to host an image that's already on the web but it's the idea that counts, I reckon).
>Using Chrome, I tried to drag and drop an image on a web site to Pasteboard and it didn't work.
This action has been working for quite some time on Google Images [1] (drag and drop an image from a different tab to the search bar) so it's probably a design oversight.
Regardless, I personally find drag and drop between different windows I haven't prepared in advance a real bother. I'd rather have the OS filepicker pop-up on click, navigate to my images, switch to icon previews and select the image there.
I'm planning to add some more Google Analytics tracking events to get some more data on how the site is being used, I don't have any data to give you at this moment.
About being able to drag images from another website, I decided to wait with implementing that feature since the main point of the app is to upload images that aren't already hosted somewhere else. The only use case it would have is if you'd like to crop the image before sharing it with others. I might add some analytics to track that too, to see how many there are that actually are trying to do that.
It actually starts preuploading the image to the server as soon as you insert it, clicking the upload button just confirms that you want to upload the image. When you click the button the server starts uploading the image to the cloud and generates the link for it.
The extra step is also there to let you crop the image, if you wish.
Does it work in Safari in the Mac? I tested it there but no joy (Safari 6 on 10.8) I've been struggling with Safari myself - it only allows you to catch paste events if the user is pasting into a text box - unlike Chrome which lets you catch paste events no matter what HTML element type catches them. I think google docs works around this by having an invisible text box capture & re-direct interaction events.
Pasting in Safari doesn't quite work, like you said the paste event requires a text box to trigger, and while it seems to have the same clipboard API as Chrome, images don't seem to show up there.
In Firefox a contenteditable div is used to catch pasted content, when images are pasted an img tag with base64 encoded image data is inserted, which is easy to just grab and display. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in Safari.
Because Safari seems to support all the needed APIs, it's hard to detect and inform the user that copy and paste doesn't work. I'd rather not do any browser sniffing.
One thing that I'm missing here are the Terms Of Service. Uploading stuff on other people's servers is always a legally problematic business. It should be made clear that the uploader retains all rights on the images.
I love it, quick question - under the websocket connection, I see that you're generating an ID with a pretty interesting algorithm, is there any purpose of it, or is it simply random characters? The format is very interesting.
It would be brilliant if you could now extend the simple interface to some additional features like cropping, rotating, maybe even some photo filters. I'd definitely use it.
There's no way to delete the images at the moment. I'm considering different methods of handling this, since that seems to be something that many want.
Bug report: I've copy-pasted an image file from my desktop and that's what a got: http://pasteboard.co/1345297649815178.png (that's an OSX default thumbnail image, not my image file). Chrome 20 @ OSX 10.6.8