Thread:Talk:Mobile design/Uploads/Allow easy import from auto-upload sites

Several photo-hosting and sharing websites have apps that can be set up to automatically upload all mobile photos to their site. Those that come to mind include Google+/Picasaweb, Facebook, and Flickr. However, only Flickr images can be imported to Commons, and even that is not as simple as it ought to be. For other sites, the image must first be downloaded to a computer and then uploaded anew to Commons.

I suggest that a better way to improve uploads from mobile devices would be to take advantage of those existing services and allow/improve importing from them. Perhaps an example can best illustrate this: A Commons contributor -- let's call him "Cmadler" :-) -- takes a vacation, during which he takes hundreds of photos on a smartphone, which he has set to automatically upload to Google. It can be difficult to gauge photo quality on a phone screen, so once he returns home or gets to any computer (because the photos are already online), Cmadler reviews all the photos, selects those of sufficient quality, and with a few quick clicks, imports then across into Commons.

Certainly there are some spam and copyvio concerns about enabling this sort of "upload from URL" feature, but there are plenty of ways to mitigate this. It could be limited to certain services. It could be limited to some class of at-least-moderately trusted users, or require a user-right granted upon request. It could even be limited to a user's own photos on another service (e.g., in Commons I would somehow authenticate my Google account before I'd be able to import directly). Regardless of the details of the implementation, I argue that this sort of import function should be a higher priority than improving the direct-from-mobile upload process. Cmadler (talk) 19:51, 25 January 2013 (UTC)