The concept for this website just came to me after a party at my house.

It was the Saturday before Halloween 2006, and I had three people asking me for pictures from the night before. The first thought was to just email them out, but emailing 160MBs of pictures didn't seem like a good idea. Plus with most mailservers having attachment size limits, it just seemed stupid. Plus, I would then have to rinse, wash, and repeat for everyone else that wanted pictures at a later date. Add to the fact that I didn't feel like shrinking and compressing a bunch of photos, so this option just seemed like a waste.

My next thought was to just upload all the photos to my webserver. This way anyone that wanted to, at any given time, could stop by my site and grab the photos. Now, while this would have been an easy task, it just didn't have the flair I wanted. Plus, designing something cool would be a great boost to my resume!

So I started off making a simple website, where people could view albums from various events, and see the pictures from those events. First as thumbnails, then a mid-sized view, and finally having the option to download the full resolution (4 megapixel from my camera) images. It was coming along well, and my friends seemed to like the idea. Then it was time to get fancy.

Throw in a little tagging, add some searching, allow for commenting, and next thing you know I had a bigger idea. Why not make this completely available to my friends as well. Let them upload their pictures from the same night, from their camera, so that all the pictures from a given night are available in one album. Then everyone could go to that album, and see all the pictures form the night. So instead of me asking for pictures from Dave and Nicole, they can just upload them to my site, and everyone can collectively share. This seemed like an idea that a lot of people could benefit from, and so PhotoSwap was born.