The photo above is a white board drawing of the new Photo 2.0 architecture and flow of information. It is OK if you don’t understand it – the important thing to know is it allows us to add a bunch of cool photo features and continue to expand.
We released the beginnings of the Photos 2.0 Project last week. The first visible part of this was the release of participant photo uploads.
Not really visible to users is the movement of over 4 Million photos to the new infrastructure and a new database architecture that more tightly integrates photos into the rest of the system. The data migration took over 8 hours to complete, but now the new system allows for faster development and tighter integration with the rest of RunSignup and GiveSignup. Oh, and it is even faster.
Here is a rough outline of the features we will be adding over the next 3 months:
- Participant Uploads – Better access to allow participants to upload photos from multiple points like when logging activities in challenges. Also allow option for photo uploads without login, but with the same phone number or email validation as virtual results logging.
- Better Album & Photo Organization – improved user experience that shows participant uploads alongside race director or photographer uploads. Photo albums in Profile will allow participants to easily see past event photos of their own albums, as well as easily pick to make a new profile picture. Allow photo sorting and moving photos between albums, or be located in multiple albums.
- Moderation – Allow flagging of photos.
- Custom Domain Support – better search capabilities for races and ticket events with their own domain.
- Better Results Integration – Show photos on overall and individual results pages. Also show photos on Finisher Certificates.
- Investigate new bib tagging solution other than Google Vision to improve tagging rate.
- Sync with time.
- More watermarking options including result data.
- Email marketing tags.
- Improved notifications.
- Nonprofit Ticket and Donation Website support.
- Photo API to allow other apps to post photos. This will be useful for third party apps that automate finish line photos, as well as RaceJoy.
- Improve UX of the Photo Dashboard.
As usual, we will be making these changes incrementally as we make progress. The system is already pretty powerful, but the new releases will provide races, events and nonprofits with a powerful way to engage their supporters. And as usual – all for free.
