LifeMarch 21, 2009

Does a PhotoBin exist? (a PasteBin for photos)

By Ian

From the ‘I want something like this…’ dept:  Whilst working in my log-book for my long-running science/physic client I sketched a ‘Win32 Console App -> DLL/COM interface -> Matlab -> (wicked pointer casts) DLL/COM interface -> fn in Console app’ diagram.

You don’t need to know what the above does, just imagine three big boxes and six arrows.

Having implemented the process (and discovering that it doesn’t work for various interesting reasons) I wrote up the process in MS Word to generate a short report.  Rather than try to re-implement the diagram I just wanted to photograph it (with my iPhone), upload it ‘somewhere’, then take the resulting jpg and embed it in the Word doc.

It occurs to me that this is a photo-equivalent of a programming PasteBin (wikip), but I don’t know of any such facility.  I could use Flickr but that feels permanent (and public), I just want a throwaway URL with no association to myself that dies a bit later when I’m done with it.

Does such a service exist?

Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.

6 Comments

  • Erik
    Two immediately come to mind, I'm guessing there are plenty of others: http://grabup.com/ http://skitch.com/
  • Ian
    Hi Erik, thanks for the links. Note that these are for uploading *images of your desktop* rather than images of physical diagrams taken on a mobile phone (or camera). What I want is a really easy service where I can email a photo in (or send an MMS) and it magically appears, no registration required, with a url where I can grab the image. Think of the ease of mailinator.com for throwaway email accounts applied to taking a photo and getting it 'somewhere' easily accessible online.
  • Erik
    Ah, I see that I misread what you were originally asking for. Note that Skitch (and possibly the other one, though I don't use it so I'm not sure) does let you drag an existing image file in and you can save it to your Skitch account's web folder, so you aren't limited only to screen shots. But it doesn't meet the two requirements of having an anonymous one-time pastebin or being capable of working from an iPhone. That's unfortunate; it would be a neat service.
  • shardcore
    hmm, seems like somewhat of a non-problem. from your iphone you can just email to yourself - i use this method all the time. and, of course, when os 3.0 comes out in the summer, we'll be able to *finally* send files via bluetooth [a function i miss greatly from switching from my k800i to an iphone] i think a (possibly) more useful service would be to be able to take a photo of a diagram or simple line drawing and run it through an online vector conversion service [e.g. http://vectormagic.com/] and produce something clean and scalable which would probably look better in a document. in fact, perhaps that's a 5k app - a mail interface that reads an attachment and runs it through some sort of svg conversion. if only i weren't so busy... personally, i've found the best ideas are often recorded on beer mats and the inside of fag packets - so i keep a scrap book instead...
  • Ian Ozsvald
    Ah, yes, the emailing feature. Hadn't thought of that! I'm still in Nokia N80-mindset mode with MMS. Ok, must try emailing a photo from the iPhone, cheers.