Tim
Life is good Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo

The last few years for the site have been great. Lots of great content and at least a little traffic. But I'm working towards something better, bigger, and more friendly, with distraction free writing. Not that it's to distracting now. I just know it can be better. So I'm rebuilding the site with a few key concepts in mind. 

Multi-User Friendly

One thing I've wanted for a couple years is more focus on multi user aspects. I want to give the users an option to brand the site to them for all their content. With the exception that this is not MySpace. It's not a free for all. It's intended to be a safe place. 

Another key feature of multi-user is shared spaces. One thing I never see on the web is shared image galleries. Say you go to a wedding. So does your brother, sister, and crazy Aunt Jane. Shared galleries will allow each person to contribute their own images and story without having to be a site member and go through the process of setting their own identity up. 

Privacy

The same options there are now to restrict comments, view posts, and contribute will all be in the new version. These will have more global options and defaults. This will allow you to quickly draft a post or gallery and keep the defaults you set. Then if that’s not enough, go back and edit on a per-post basis. 

Blogging and Editing

This is going to be a big shake up. I hate the editor that is currently being used. Hate it. There are a few other options floating around. Mainly the Markdown syntax will be adopted to draft content. This comes with some loss and a learning curve. But it's part of the idea of distraction free writing. 

Anonymity

While this is not going to be a widely used function, it's going to be fully embraced. Feel like sharing thoughts, ideas, and anything in between? The ability to publish anonymously will be available. Posts will not generally be indexed in the site along with main-stream content, and the functionality might not even be available in the main site, but the feature will be there as an application. 

Speed

Another feature will be speed. I want to make the site hum. With luck the sites images will be hosted out in Amazons S3 storage or a similar cloud storage. This will allow the images to load faster and free my internet connection to just serve the site structure and off load the images to someone else. \

Metadata

I will be picking out many key elements of the images and give the ability to serve up the image properties right alongside the images. This includes Geo-Tags, camera model and settings, and other properties about the image. 

Above all the site offers something fairly unique, the ability to retain all of your images, as you took them in their original state. This has always been my idea. Unlike photo sharing sites the originals are left fully intact and able to be retrieved by the owner. After all it's your image. You should be able to access it and get it back if you want it. 

Buy why do I keep the original around?

I like to think of this as another backup of all my images. With over 60,000 images, it's a challenge to keep a backup in triplicate, and keep it consistent. The site allows me to keep any images uploaded to it in constant sync with multiple computes and hard drives (including an offsite backup). So think of this as your personal, free backup. 

Is the site missing something you would like to see? Post it in the comments and I'll add it to the list if it's worth doing.