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/
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…
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.