Recently launched a new hosting for storing and publishing images - Picsa.ru . I want to tell you about this service, as one of the developers of its interface.

Another photohosting, devoid of any hope?

Creating Piks , we did not set out to surpass the giants of the media industry. At first, we were faced with the task of optimizing work with images for our services. What turned out to be interesting to us, and we decided to make the photo hosting site public.
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We knew something about the visitors of our services: they are mostly people for whom the Internet began with social networks. They love to communicate on sites, love gadgets and amaze with the ability to quickly find and master all new ways of communication. They were the center of attention when we filled this project with life.

Ease of use and reliability of the technical "stuffing" have become the development motto for us. A little later they added external austerity and a number of experiments in the field of interface.

About features Pixels in pictures

What have we done? Here are a few features:

• each album is a canvas, the images on which are arranged by the user in an arbitrary manner;
• no unnecessary actions, only placement → organization → publication;
• photo stream - a continuous dynamic stream of images uploaded by random users who have not registered - just for fun.
  

The main functionality is concentrated in the upper controller - a black strip. The selection of pictures for download can be started immediately by clicking on the title “Upload picture”. After selecting the images, the download will start immediately.




The loading indicator in the form of a rainbow stripe and the usual "twist" inform about the process.



By default, if you are not registered, the pictures fall into the "My Pictures" section. If you are registered - in the album “Disassembled”, if no other one was chosen.



Each album is a separate canvas with its own composition of pictures on it. Images on canvas can be “carried” along it, arranged on a grid or in any order.



The “Tile” function helps to place on the grid, and the “Stick” switch directs the pictures on the grid as they are dragged.



It is most convenient to work with canvas albums through the “My Albums” pop-up (collapsed into the icon in the image below). Pictures from any canvas can be moved to any other by dragging it to the right place in the drop-out.



In this screenshot, you can see that the controller flexibly adjusts to the screen width up to sizes of 640 pixels wide. Of course, this does not apply to the author's placement of pictures: if you formed a composition on the screen at 1280 pixels, it is unlikely to fit in 640. But if such a need suddenly arose, it is easy to change the scale without affecting the composition.

Editing of album names and pictures occurs in the context of the place where they are located. For example, the name of the album is edited directly in bread crumbs.



Links to insert into the blog can be obtained from the context menu of the album or image,



or on the image preview page close up.



Any interface is more pleasant and more interesting to learn in business, so, you are welcome .

Warranties and Filling

Most of us have blogs. The volume of the media resource sent daily to the network is growing rapidly. Personally, I do not want to place most of the materials with which I work on my paid hosting (on it I try to keep only the content created by me). For this, I use third-party services. And, like many of us, it is important to me first of all that the stored images

• available at any time of the day for any part of the world
• stayed there until i needed them.

Everyone is interested in the guarantees that give such services. They asked about them and us. As I already mentioned, Peaks servers are partly involved in solving important tasks for our services. It is logical to assume that we will monitor their performance.
As for the "stuffing". For the benefit of the owners of the “flooded images”, today there are two backup servers with a total capacity of 10 terabytes of disk space. "Muzzle" and the database are spinning on the third server. The whole bundle is running Ruby on Rails . File servers are “sharpened” for working with images and use a distributed file system for this. The latter allows you to create highly reliable data storage through flexible custom replication of files.

A little about future plans

Whether this project will have a future is basically up to you. In short, I will talk about what we still want to implement in the near future.
We want to completely get away from the modes that are still present in the interface, and provide the user with a single canvas space on which all the albums will be presented at the same time. We want to add simple group actions and make the interface scalable.
For the first version, we also prepared an introduction to the service elements of "socialization". For example, in the work on the compilation of albums and collages was supposed to introduce friends. A natural continuation of the start will also be the addition of add-ons to popular browsers, simplifying the process of downloading images.

Thank you, and fill the pictures !