OC Photographers of kbin, looking for your feedback

Hi everyone!

We’re gearing up to launch a Web3 multimedia platform designed specifically with the photography workflow in mind. In a nutshell, it’s IPFS pinning, image transformations and optimization, analytics, and copyright protection under one roof.

Right now, we're in the private beta stage and looking for people willing to try it out and share their experience. Many of us on the team are photographers ourselves, so part of the inspiration was to create something to make our own workflow easier. But the ultimate goal is to make the app useful for many people, not just us, and that's why absolutely all feedback is extremely valuable now.

If you're interested, just leave a comment, and I'll reach out to you with an invite to private Beta. Or if you'd like to look around yourself first, here's more about the project: https://macula.link/

woss,

Here is one of photos I shared on https://mastodon.social/@woss/111183478465886978 and https://twitter.com/woss_io/status/1709972978736181501

With Maculas Unilink I can show my photography with a title and description without giving a royalty-free license to Twitter or Facebook.

If you examine https://u.macula.link/Zd6nfwu-RgaFB453OlXmLA-7.json this data source and search for ipfsCid key you will see a value that is accessible from any public gateway.

https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/bafybeidzzumbmcneaz7ymfsilxapho4fm2v3dgy57x3hhhicaptwbbkg7e << i do not host this photo on pinata yet it is still available

You can also use Macula public gateway https://ipfs.macula.link/ipfs/bafybeidzzumbmcneaz7ymfsilxapho4fm2v3dgy57x3hhhicaptwbbkg7e

Lastly, if you use a metadata checker like jimpl.org for the above images served from IPFS you will see that the Macula Unilink contains all that info to generate this page https://u.macula.link/Zd6nfwu-RgaFB453OlXmLA-7/

Cheers,
W

atzanteol,

I’m intrigued by the idea of IPFS - but it seems to have some significant limitations…

Everything you store there is basically ‘public’. So you can only use it for things you want to make public. Which is probably fine for sharing but not so much for storage like Dropbox does. And once you put something out there you lose control over it. There’s no reasonable guarantee it will remain available, you can’t retract it, you can’t restrict access, etc.

It’s also a bit like bit-torrent in that if people stop “seeding” then it’s lost. I’ve added a number of ISOs to IPFS that I was thinking could be a good solution for archiving old software on. But they’re now no longer available.

I’m also not sure how much of a big deal “copyright protection” is. Proving I own the copyright of something isn’t the hard part it seems but rather enforcing it - which IPFS can’t do.

NOTE: this is my understanding from what I’ve seen - if I’m wrong please let me know rather than simply down-voting me…

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

You have a good point, let me explain a bit more how do we plan to tackle what you mentioned. As for making files public and persisting files you upload: for the beta period all files are public but once we validate the idea and improve things overall, we will also add the private storage, which will be the default option; as for storage, eventually we will give options to either use rely on us to persist the files or use persistent storage of your choice (Filecoin, Crust, Arweave) and manage it via our app UI. Regarding the copyright: it is not enforced since enforced implies taking legal or administrative actions but we can prevent a fair share of infringement in the first place by carrying the copyright attribution in the original file and all modified variants, which also makes post-enforcement actions easier. Say, you embed the image from Macula on a website and some bot scrapes it. In this case the image will still carry correct attribution. And also one thing about enforcing. Part of it requires verifying that you're the original author and for that we are developing a blockchain-based network called Anagolay, which will take care of creating digitally signed cryptographic authorship statement and will have the mechanism so that any outside observer can validate that you are indeed the author.

Hope this helps, let me know if there's anything you'd like to hear in more details.

boolean,
boolean avatar

so, photos on a blockchain? I thought we tried this already with NFTs and we know how that turned out.

How is this better than any of the cloud based storage systems already available?

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

I agree that NFTs were largely overhyped, and what we're doing here is completely different. Not every decentralized storage system is a blockchain, and neither is IPFS. Simply speaking, IPFS is a network of hundreds of computers storing pieces of your files independently. So, instead of opening a URL and requesting file XYZ, you say, "I need file XYZ; whoever has it, give it to me," and whoever has it gives it to you. This is decentralized storage in a nutshell. What we are doing here is using IPFS as storage and giving photographers a toolkit that makes it super convenient to work with it, plus quality-of-life improvements like analytics and an in-built image editor. I hope this helps dispel your doubts.

crimsdings,

Kbin ?

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

This thread originally comes from /m/photography magazine on kbin.social, hence the address

Albert_K_Ross,
Albert_K_Ross avatar

I'd like the invite, please 👀

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

Done! Pls check DMs

conciselyverbose, (edited )

I'm interested in how sharing works. A lot of the former favorites transitioned to forcing you into their awful apps.

It would also depend a lot on pricing. I understand the issues places had just allowing unlimited photo hosting for free, but there would need to be a lot of value added beyond that before it's something I'd pay much for. I understand the business realities, but I haven't found anything with the right balance.

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

Good point, I'm with you on this one. The goal of the sharing mechanics is to be like a layer over IPFS that gives you additional features like adding on-the-fly image transformations (meaning you set ?width=100px in the URL and the server processes the image before showing it to whoever requested it) and analytics (which gives you the ability to see from which sources your photos are being accessed. This can also be a huge help in fighting unauthorized use -- if you see views coming from some shady site, you can immediately check it and file the copyright claim). And in addition to all this you also preserve full metadata, which (1) is useful to prove your ownership and (2) will help in further licensing since we also add metadata for getting a "licenseable" mark in Google Images.

Here's an example with one of my photos: https://jimpl.com/results/JLqNAwmLkEt4FayuZphK9Sq3?target=exif

Some of the fields are dummy data for now since we're still in private beta stage but you can already see where this is going.

Hope this was useful, let me know if I answered your question or if you have anything else!

conciselyverbose,

Does this mean direct linking isn't possible?

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

By direct linking you mean accessing the image by its CID via any public gateway?

conciselyverbose,

I mean a url ending in the file type that another site (like a forum) can display in line without a bunch of other code they may or may not support.

That's the only thing I'm missing from other places. Everyone wants to drag you to their site with a bunch of peripheral display I have no interest in.

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

Ahhh, I see what you mean now. This is exactly our point too so once you have the link you can display it anywhere, be it a blog, comment section, git repo, etc.

Here's an example link: https://u.stg.macula.link/LHIIkEFeTTOaRo1N8Pol4A-0

It looks a bit different and doesn't have file extension but the point is the same.

If I do ![](url) it will work just like any regular image link.

https://u.stg.macula.link/LHIIkEFeTTOaRo1N8Pol4A-0

Wxfisch,
@Wxfisch@lemmy.world avatar

Ironically I see a placeholder question mark image in line in mlem because it can’t understand your direct link, negating everything you’re trying to sell in this comment. Seems like the core concept needs a bit more polishing.

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

Sure, it's still an early stage so it's guaranteed to have issues here and there. That's the point of the private beta in the first place

conciselyverbose,

Cool. I think some of the older places I use (that still use bbcode instead of markdown) break if you don't have a file type in the actual url (I can't check any time soon), but not hijacking the direct link is a good step.

I'd be interested in checking it out. Other things that would affect me actually using it full time would be the presence/quality of any tools to organize a library and what your pricing model eventually looks like. I've been flirting with self hosting my stuff but it's just one of many projects I want to do and I never seem to have the time.

I appreciate the quick responses.

woss,

Hi, I checked the BBCode docs and examples and it seems it works with our Unified link right now, Example: [img]https://u.stg.macula.link/LHIIkEFeTTOaRo1N8Pol4A-0?w=400[/img]. Here you can see that I am passing the w params which stands for width and it renders it correctly on the playground https://codebeautify.org/bbcode-viewer

Elena-Von-Tsss,
Elena-Von-Tsss avatar

So is it like a cloud storage platform? Willing to hear more about the copyright protection part 🤔

alxwnth,
alxwnth avatar

It's like a regular cloud storage but there's IPFS under the hood instead of traditional server so you don't really need to care about things like backups or migrating photos from one place to another. As for copyright protection, it works by confirming your equipment first and then issuing a digitally signed copyright statement where you state that you are the rightful owner and attach a license (for example, Creative Commons). This statement is stored on-chain and can be verified by anyone so they know it's true. I suggest checking https://anagolay.network/ to know more about the underlying technology

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