Open source recommendations for a photo/post voting site?
TLDR:
I need a website that let's signed in users vote on each others photos, and stores that data on who voted for what in a database.
Background
I run a facebook group of about 2,000 members. This group is designed for analog (any non-digital format) photographers to swap high quality artistic prints with each oter. The community was essentially dead and the admin wanted to throw in the towel so I took over. We've made progress, the group growth jumped by over 500% in the first month after I took over.
Right now trading prints doesn't work well. People make a post using the facebook selling format, and those who are interested comment with the image they'd like to trade for. The problem is that the posts get limited visibility due to facebook's algorithms, and stale posts hang around. All of this reduces over all activity, and the majority of posts don't end up in a trade.
My solution is to do a trade event with everyone participating at the same time. Since facebook doesn't lend itself to this I'd like to whip up a quick site for the event. My time is so limited these days I really don't have the capacity to build something from scratch, and the group certainly doesn't have any other developers to help out with it (it skews heavily on the older side).
I'd like to find an open source project that lets users sign in (sign in using facebook would be a bonus) and upload/vote on images. After the voting closes, I'll write code to pair everyone up in a way that optimizes for everyone getting to make a trade. If Alice votes for Bob's image, and Bob votes for Alice's image, they would get paired up to make the swap.
I feel okay writing the code to map out swaps, but I'm pretty terrible at web design and especially at front end design. I've looked across github, but I wanted to reach out and see if anyone could recommend something that I might of missed.
I don't expect to have 2,000 members participate, I think it may be as few as under 100, so hopefully I won't need to worry about scale.
Thanks in advance for the help!
Sounds like you want a "booru". You can upload images and tag them, it displays them as a gallery, and there's voting features. Implementations of the concept are Shimmie 2 and Danbooru.
Thanks for the resource. I went to check out those sites to see the UI and was caught a bit off guard by the content 😲
But the cool thing is that they look pretty easy to modify, so I may just spin one of those up to try it out
Have you looked at Discourse? It's a generic forum software, but it could be configured to function as a photo voting site.
One wrinkle might be that it assumes that topic categories are more or less fixed. If you set up a separate category for each new trade event, things might get unwieldy down the road, like the UI for category navigation. This topic discusses some options for how to handle such periodic events.
That looks pretty cool!
I'm going to look through the themes and see if there's a way to include a large thumbnail of the image for the post, I really don't want the users to have to click every post to see the image. I'm also going to see if there's any way to do a grid view of all of the posts too.
Thanks for sharing this, I'm hopeful this will be a good solution :)
Haven't looked at in in ageeees, but a while ago MediaGoblin seemed to be all the rage. It seems it is still being developed too.
I love the simplicity of it. It looks like it would be pretty easy to modify with some custom code, which would be really helpful to me
Thanks for sharing :)
I don’t have an answer but I think it would be great to have a website like this.
I’m curious, how do “swaps” work in your community? Are people mailing physical prints to each other? Could they share more than one print of a photo?
Thanks, there's a lot evolving with it right now.
Yes, these are all physical prints getting mailed, and there's no restrictions on how many prints of a particular photo can be traded. It operates on a good faith honor system similar to reddit secret Santa.
Historically prints could be swapped or sold (to cover costs, not for large profit). Someone would post a print to the group and wait around for someone willing to trade/buy it to comment or message them.
Unfortunately that format has worked very poorly for us.
The group had such little activity since it was founded a couple of years ago that 3 months back the owner made a post saying he needed someone to take over as he was throwing in the towel.
I stepped up and he turned it over to me. He didn't know me. He asked like 4 questions then made me sole admin 24 hours later, which shows just how done he was. I've been engaging with the community to find a better path forward. We've moved to a heavy focus on swapping instead of selling. We still allow people to post prints for sale, but we've made it clear in the rules it's not a commercial group.
I'm hoping that having an event that gets everyone to post at once will help, and that having a site built with trading in mind will get us swapping prints :)
Right now users post an image of their offer in the thread of a print they are interested in swapping for?
If I have that right, I suggest trying to preserve that mechanism, even if the website is a large gallery of all the submissions in a round of swapping, and the match logic is done offline.
Seeing images of offers in their own thread might be a discovery mechanism right now. That is, a print that someone likes that is a viable match (has already been offered for their print) is easier to discover if they see it and engage with the user in their own thread.
If every user looks through every submission, even after all submissions are in, and decides on what they like, it might still be harder to make matches if they can't easily see the prints from interested users.
I'm not super confident about this functionality being offered off the shelf, but it might be. Basically every other requirement is met easily, and the entire project would be very simple to diy, as the matching logic is offline. If none of the fediverse solutions like pixelfed will work turnkey for you, then I might be able to help. But pixelfed is probably where I would start.
That's a great point and something I'll get community feedback on. I'm trying to get a group of beta testers together and I'll make sure to get their response on this aspect in particular.
Thanks for this insight :)
Second Discourse for a flexible and open source post-and-discuss-things site. But if you ever want to spin up a more long-term media sharing site: I like Gurlic's design a whole lot.
Sadly it appears down and the source code was never released. Hopefully @ahq is just AWOL for a little bit.
I'll keep an eye out for that, thanks :)