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mobile photo sharing


  • not1_name
    Member

    @not1_name

    12 years, 1 month ago

    I want to build a mobile (primarily iphone) photo sharing site for a group of friends. I am currently trying to make it work with buddypress. The problems I need to overcome seem to be the same with any of the other social network builders, but the WP/BP community seems to be better at resolving problems! After a month of trying to sort things out, I thought I may try a shout out to see if anyone is in the same boat, and has any options I haven’t considered.

    The two main problems:

    1. The site is mainly for mobile, and I can only find one mobile plugin for BP. This is the least of my problems as plugin works. But I can’t find any documentation about how to better style it. And is there really only one mobile theme for BP?

    2. Mobile safari on the iphone does not allow photo uploads. This is the biggy. I’ve tried a couple of iphone apps that work as an intermediary to get the photos off the phone and into BP. I can get photos into a BP folder with a thumbnail too, but am struggling with how to get them into the activity stream. Bit too much of a PHP headache for my skills.

    With the twitter integration in ios5, I thought I may be able to pull in the photos from tweets which can be sent directly from the iphone camera. But there is the problem that the twitter account really needs to be shared, otherwise everyone will have to set up their accounts to sync with BP, and any personal tweets will all go to the BP stream. Still working on if the joint account system could work.

    The other option is to Pull in photos from Flickr. iphone users take a photo with the flickr app, and the photos are synced to the stream or gallery. Again a joint flickr account for everyone would be better. This should be the easiest option, but I don’t seem to be able to get the buddystream plugin to work. I’m sure I’ll get it soon.

    Anyone have any other ideas on how to smoothly get iphone picks into BP for friends to view on a mobile devise and download to their own phone? I’m sure there must be people trying to do the same, so let’s pool our knowledge and efforts and get this to work.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • modemlooper
    Moderator

    @modemlooper

    12 years, 1 month ago

    Creating a mobile theme for BP is a huge task that others might not want to take on. There seems to be a movement in using responsive themes instead.

    As for pic uploads on iOS there is only 3 options: the intermediary app, a native app and an email image option. I’ve never tried doing the email option as I think it’s a clunky method. Facebook gives this type of option but I think it’s more for feature phones with cameras, not smartphones with apps. Would instagram be as successful if you could only email in photos?

    Other option, like you stated, is to use other services to get photos into BuddyPress; twitpic, instagram, Flickr etc.


    not1_name
    Member

    @not1_name

    12 years, 1 month ago

    Thank you for your response. When I said mobile theme, I actually meant responsive. The default does an okay job, but needs a bit of work to make it more like a web app feal. I working on that now.

    So there are no more options for io5 that I hadn’t considered…
    I’ll use flickr until a native app becomes available.

    Someone please write it!


    modemlooper
    Moderator

    @modemlooper

    12 years, 1 month ago

    I doubt a native solution will be written for free, too much work and native app couldn’t be branded to an individual site. Not sure if that matters but if enough people wanted I could build one app to upload images with a site license fee. “BuddyPics” or something similarly named.


    not1_name
    Member

    @not1_name

    12 years, 1 month ago

    Please do write it! I think I mentioned this to you on another thread. It doesn’t need to be branded, just really stripped down, so it doesn’t look out of place. An even more generic name would be better. “photo upload” or “iphone upload”. Charge a license fee. Many people will need it, so you could make some good coin. A WP version would be useful for some people too, but BP needs it more because of it social sharing focus. The key is not so much the upload function, which other apps already have, but the deploying of the photos once sent. There needs to be a button on everyones profile or gallery page, and a button on the activity stream. When the button is clicked, the app (if already downloaded) opens up and allows uploads from the iphone library or to take a picture. Once uploaded you are redirected back to the page in safari. Getting the photo into the uploaders gallery or activity stream is the tricky part, which I haven’t worked out yet…

    A nice simple app that I’ve used to upload pics to a WP gallery is aurigma up. Nice and simple interface, but still has some serious bugs in ios5, and no native image rotation support yet.
    If you want an idea of what looks terrible, try i-dump for WP. The worst looking interface I’ve seen, and they actually charge for the app. I can’t get it to work either, but to be honest, I didn’t try for long…

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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