PicNik | Devpost

Inspiration

We often take part in university trips and spend time in various temporary companies of acquaintances and strangers. During events, we collect contact information from all group members and create group chats for messaging. After such events, reminders, and requests for shared photos should be sent. As a result, after temporary events, unnecessary contacts and groups remain, and shared photos are lost.

What it does

PicNik is a platform for sharing group photos from short one-off events. This is available for both Apple and Android users, it allows you to maintain the confidentiality of contact information and rids your phone's memory of unnecessary details, such as temporary contacts and group chats. A temporary group with a unique QR code receives a room for sharing everyday photos, limited to 24 hours from the generated QR code. This way, all temporary group members will be able to upload and download the photos they like without sharing personal data.

How we built it

PicNik was built with the lowest barrier-of-entry for the user in mind. Instead of using an auth solution, we create a human-readable id that can be easily shared by word of mouth. We also built-in a QR code for further shareability.

Challenges we ran into

During an extensive brainstorming session, our team unanimously settled on an idea to pursue throughout the competition. However, the execution posed its own set of challenges, particularly in determining the application's format. While a mobile app emerged as the most intuitive and user-friendly choice, constraints such as the need for additional expertise, skills, and financial resources led us to pivot towards developing a web-based platform. This decision necessitated thorough analysis and audience projections to ensure alignment with our target demographic. As a group comprised of three students in their early years of study, each with limited coding experience, we encountered hurdles along the way by using unfamiliar technologies and facing unexpected challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the result of our teamwork: we went from brainstorming ideas to implementing a web application with a successful front and back-end connection in less than 24 hours. We are one Judging Expo away from the “I demoed" sticker!

What we learned

As newcomers to the world of coding, embarking on the creation of PicNick has been a journey of discovery for us. Through this project, we delved into unfamiliar territories such as Figma, Next.js, TailwindCSS, and backend technologies like Cloudflare workers and Cloudflare R2. Beyond the confines of HackPSU, the significance of this newfound knowledge and experience resonates deeply, enabling us to grasp concepts of both front-end and back-end technologies and apply them to solve real-life problems.

What's next for PicNik

The platform now focuses on creating spaces for shared photos during temporary short events. Potential improvements include taking into account users' general geolocation during a temporary event, recognizing faces in shared photos, and prioritizing them when downloading. PicNik has the potential to transform into a mobile application that also offers the creation of temporary chats for exchanging not only photos but also messages.