The Wonsys Blog

We’re finally ready to announce another client project we’ve been working on since the end of Spring: Pixménage.

Pixménage allows photographers to manage their digital — or digital-ized, as I prefer them ;) — photos with ease.
You can create an online portfolio and share photos with clients and colleagues, or even family.
It’s a great archiving tool, as it allows you to tag photos, put them in albums, crop and rotate them, and all sort of useful stuff.

It was built with professional photographers in mind, so it supports basically all kind of RAW files, it can import/export from FTP, it allows for collaborative work on photo selections with clients, etc.

No wonder working with huge 250MB RAW files wasn’t as easy as pie: while in development mode, it’s no biggie, because you know you’re processing only one photo at a time, but we had to develop it as if there were hundreds of users uploading photos at the same time, so we built a very simple, yet extremely powerful queuing mechanism which allows us to asynchronously process photos while leaving the users free to do whatever they want. And should we need more power, we can simply drop one more server in the processing cloud.
We tried to work with stuff like Backgroundrb, but they didn’t live up to expectations, so we had to opt for the custom tailored solution — which in the end, is the best choice, at least most of the times.
In the future we might give EC2 a try, also considering we’re using S3 for storing photos, but right now we’re very happy with our own stack.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.
We’re constantly improving it, so we’re very open to feedback.

This post was written by Michele 1 year ago on November 22nd, 2007 early morning.
Tags: client, photography, Rails, s3.