Show HN: Somewhere – Instagram hack motivates you to travel more

[rememberlenny]

One issue, the site highjacks the back button.

Otherwise, beautifully amazing.

[dkordik]

I was actually going to request some way to go back to a previous image. I didn't realize I could just use the back button. Glad you pointed that out! @OP: worth adding a back button in the site UI?

[BenjaminN]

Hey, thanks !

[Ryanmf]

How are you curating these images? Which is to say, how are you ensuring that I see a really great photo of the Azure Window[0] (which happened to be posted two weeks ago) rather than whichever random one Ig turns up first?

I had a semi-similar idea (but focused on graffiti) but all the restrictions in their API terms were sort of a turn off.

[0] http://instagram.com/p/itwBoKwBnp/

[BenjaminN]

I told more about this on Cool Hunting [0] but basically I'm manually selecting the best one. So I have a list of ~150 shots, I'm sorting by likes (which most of the time is not relevant at all) and removing all the #selfies using a face recognition algorithm.

[0] http://www.coolhunting.com/travel/smwhre-app.php

[duiker101]

Love the idea!

I tried and the first result was a place in London, cool but I basically live 40 min away. The second was Auschwitz. I was kinda not too motivated.

But still very nice!

[BenjaminN]

Randomness is not nice with you today, I'm sorry. My advice: don't play any lottery game.

[morsch]

I like it. How about adapting the background color gradient to the major colors of the picture? E.g. using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905547

[BenjaminN]

Ahah, I had that idea too, but there's a security problem with images from Instagram. Long story short: they don't allow cross-origin resource sharing, so that doesn't work.

[bgnm2000]

This is awesome - only wish it were faster, and that I could save my favorites.

[BenjaminN]

Might be slow because of the HN effect. Saving a place is a great idea, but that means creating accounts, and that complicates everything. You might just "like" the place on facebook.

[tchadwick]

I really like this. I've already found some interesting places!

[BenjaminN]

I have a lot of favorite ones, but the craziest is certainly this one: http://smwh.re/door-to-hell

I finally have a good reason to go to Turkmenistan !

[mrkyone]

Smart hack! Where did you get those places from?

[BenjaminN]

The web and foursquare.

[legohead]

please don't take over my back button

[BenjaminN]

Man, I'm so sorry for your back button, I hope he's okay :3