RAW Collective Processing Service

    Processing and retouching photos is now sometimes no less important than shooting directly. Professionals and often photo enthusiasts work with the RAW format, which is a digital negative. But photo processing requires experience and knowledge.
    I came up with the idea to create a website where amateurs and professionals could practice processing other people's photos, lay out their RAW-kits to be torn to pieces by the community, which can be useful for self-learning.
    If you want to know how this was done and what came of it, welcome to cat.

    How is this done


    The site was written from scratch in exactly one week.
    (I personally don’t understand when projects of this level are called by startups, investors, a development team, etc. are searched)
    Under the hood of python with the web.py framework, which I like for its simplicity and lack of congestion, this is especially true for small projects. In the process of creation, I ran into several problems:
    RAW files take up decently places, but I really want to give people the opportunity to post them and download them for further processing. The first hundred such files and place on VDS would come to an end. The solution turned out to be obvious - to store content in the cloud (the choice fell on selectel.ru, which repeatedly spoke about themselves on the hub).
    The first day the heavy files are on the hosting, and then once a day the script comes and transfers to the cloud. In order not to bother with link changes, the usual apache forwarding was configured with the requested file missing.
    The second problem is the preview of RAW files. Users should see what downloadable RAWs are. The problem was solved using the dcraw utility. This utility can pull out previews sewn into raw and relieve the server of the load of full RAW development.

    What came of it.


    I am pleased to introduce you to rawme.ru - a site where you can:
    • Upload your RAW snaps to everyone. There is no need for file hosting, files are uploaded directly to the site.
    • Train in processing other people's pictures. You can download the source, process it as you like and post the result. You can attach an XMP file to the photo so that others can repeat the result.
    • Upload files privately. Only those who have a secret link can view, download the source code and add options (for example: rawme.ru/private/55b82354ba412b5eab1334a5dd7a541e )
    • Participate in writing articles, discussions on the forum.


    All uploaded photos are posted under the cc by-nc-sa license , this is necessary so that other users can safely create derivatives of your work.

    Everything is absolutely free. Monetization is planned through advertising on the site (adsense and a special promo page).

    I hope my service will be useful to someone.

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