▲ 1 points

Ask HN: Photo web gallery hidden costs

by AlexeyBrin·11y ago·4 comments·view on hn ↗

Hi,

I have a photographer friend and he recently asked me if I can implement a simple web photo gallery for him. Basically he wants to be able to upload his own photos under some permissive license and let other people use them for free.

The web dev part is not a problem. What concerns me are the hidden prices in this kind of application, like bandwidth cost etc ... He plans to start with 5000 high quality images and upload regularly other images.

Can someone give me some insights in what he can expect as bandwidth cost ? (I've advised him to buy a cheap $5 VPS from Digital Ocean).

Thanks

4 comments

Are there no existing services that will work for him? If so, I'd be curious what "let other people use them" means. He is going to have people directly linking to them which will chew up his bandwidth. And if you plan to put controls on that, then you're going down a path of greater development complexity.

I recommend Cloudinary or 6px for doing any non-trivial image-based websites. Those services abstract away huge parts of the complexity of storing, manipulating, and delivering images online.

He wants his website because he wants to have two main sections - one for his photos and one for blogging about photography. I think he intends to let other people use his photos for free as long as they don't claim they took the photo or something like that.

What if you built the site so that he hosts his photos on Flickr or some third party service that will handle the bandwidth if it were ever to become an issue?

Thanks for your suggestion, I'll think about it and talk to my friend.