5 Reasons To Use Steepshot for Posting Pictures : A Steepshot Guide

in #steepshot7 years ago

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Preface

Steemit is remarkable in every sense that we can think of. We are lucky to be part of such a great platform at such an early stage.

As steemit continues to grow, the possibilities of diversification of Steem Powered Platforms have grown with it. With the power of Steem Blockchain, people are now moving their entire social media activities to these platforms.

Why?

Because our time spent on the social media is worth something. It has to be.. the decentralization of censorship is mandatory. The decentralization of data is now obligatory...

With likes of @zappl replacing twitter, @dmania replacing 9gag, @dsound replacing soundcloud and @dtube replacing youtube, there was an urgent need to replace instagram... a photo-sharing social media platform where you can post your photos / videos.

Enters Steepshot

https://steepshot.io is the first photo-sharing steem powered application.

The CEO of Steepshot is @pmartynov A.K.A Pavel Martynov who hails from Minsk, Belarus. He successfully co-founded @steepshot along with his dedicated group of devs.

Unrelated to this post, I would like to highlight here that I am extremely thankful to the dev team of steepshot for choosing such a unique, exquisite and chic name for the platform instead of choosing “dGram” or “dInsta”.

I am not a big fan of names of steem powered platforms starting with “d”. Though this is my personal opinion but i strongly feel that there is a great appeal to unique names as they attract more people..

To be hoenst had the platform been named dInsta or dGram, you wouldn’t be reading this post right now :p

So coming back to topic, steepshot is the steem powered version of instagram and it is absolutely adorable.


Steepshot Basics

Before I head to the 5 reasons as to why photographer community on steemit should use steepshot, I would like to cover the basics of steepshot that includes signing up/in parts and how to use it.

Login Page / App :

You can login on steepshot at https://alpha.steepshot.io/

Alternatively you can download their app that is available for both android and apple devices. Please be warned that steepshot iOS app may not be available in certain countries’ App Store.

Sign up :

There is no need to sign up if you already have a steemit account. But if you don’t, you know what to do...

Sign in Credentials :

Signing in on steepshot is easy. All you need is your steemit username and Posting Key.. this is important, you cannot sign in by entering your master password or active key. If you dont know what is your posting key, then go to your wallet -> Permissions -> Posting Key-> Show Private Key-> copy the key and use it. See illustration below :-
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If you don’t know what are these keys and what are their uses, please follow my guide here that includes everything about permission keys.

Feed Section :

After you have successfully signed in steepshot, it will display the main page, which will look something like this :-

D0789BBF-2A3C-4156-8A33-D19A90A6DCAA.jpeg

This is your feed section and will display steepshot posts of the people you are following. As you can see my good friend @mariannewest has posted a picture there which is on top of my feed. You can scroll down to see other posts.

Creating a Steepshot Post :

Creating the post on steepshot is as easy as it goes. Click on the colourful + sign on top of screen as illustrated below :-
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It will open a page that will look like this :-
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Fill the required information as depicted on page and click on “create new post” button at the bottom.

And there you go... you have successfully posted your first post via steepshot.

Please keep in mind that whatever you post on steepshot will also be displayed on your steemit blog.


5 Reasons to Use Steepshot to Post Pictures

There is a growing community on steemit, that prefer to post pictures instead of writing huge text styled blogs. Some of these users are even professional photographers.

Following paragraphs will highlight as to why the community needs to use Steepshot for posting their pictures.

1. Dedicated Feed Section

Steepshot uses dedicated feed section that will not display other blog posts of steemit. Instead it will always show posts created from steepshot. The feed is endless and you can browse through Hot, New and Top sections to maximize your experience of feed..

2. Option of 20 Tags

This is really a neat feature.. we already know that steemit has a provision of using 5 tags at the end of the post to make your post visible in keyword searches people might be looking for. Steepshot takes this feature to another level by giving you the option of using 20 tags per post.

This will help your post show up in more keyword searches thus providing you with more visibility.

3. Steepshot Bot for Telegram

This is a massive feature specially for those iOS users who do not have steepshot app in their country’s App Store. Steepshot has recently developed a bot called steepshotbot that works flawlessly with Telegram.

Telegram is a wildly acclaimed cloud based messenger app. So the idea of the bot for telegram is that if you dont have steepshot app or if you don’t want to use one or the web client of steepshot, then you can configure this bot which will directly post your images to steepshot.

And of course you can comment and curate the steepshot posts from telegram via steepshotBot as well...

4. Extremely user friendly

This may sound like that I am just trying to fill the gaps here but you won’t believe the level of user friendliness this platform has to offer. The GUI is extremely simple and elegant. Navigating through the options is really easy and does not need any further assistance. This is one of those features which will bring in a lot of traffic to this platform.

5. Use of both IPFS and Cloud Storage to Store Your Pictures

This might be a deal breaker for few people who absolutely dislike centralized storages. However those of us who have struggled with decentralized IPFS protocol would understand this step almost immediately. There is never a guarantee that the end user would receive the image at all whilst using IPFS protocol.

This kind of uncertainty can kill the platform in its tracks. Most of the users don’t care what problems IPFS protocol has encountered. All they care about is successful and fast uploading and downloading of data.

So this is a really great step by steepshot to use a hybrid storage technology for their platform and as a user, you will never have to worry about your pictures being invisible or unavailable to other users.


Way Forward and Conclusion

@steepshot is working really hard to improve their platform for mass consumption. In future, they plan on to incorporate short videos to steepshot.io

I know many talented photographers like @gamer00 who are professionals and their blog on steemit is mostly pictorial in nature. I would urge everyone in general and these photographers in particular to try steepshot.

Happy posting
JBN

Kindly consider to upvote, resteem. If you would like to ask anything, please don’t hesitate to post your opinions or questions in the comment section..

Thumbnail image is designed on free tool canva, rest of the images are screenshots taken from my own device



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I have mixed feelings about steepshot appearing in my feed @jbn. From what I've seen so far it lessens the quality and I think that's even more so spread over the whole of Steemit.

I'm interested to read that you feel differently though. 😊

I have the same issue. Steepshots is what brought me to steemit. So for that I am grateful. It's also a nice way to view photos. I don't like how it posts because I want my posts here to have more context yet I don't want to create double posts.

True.. kindly check my reply to see if it satisfies your queries..

Aa yes i totally understand your point.. i think the problem lies with everything being attached to steemit.. alot of people are on steemit for good old school text style blogging so when they see just pictures and videos or memes in their feed, it makes them uncomfortable. I think the solution lies in seperation of platforms. Like you will never see instagram guys getting frustrated over receiving facebook statuses in their feed. Right? So these applications need to operate independently from steemit. What do you think??

Agree! Likewise with DTube or DSound - although for me as a musician, it makes sense when my videos, songs and podcasts appear in my newsfeed, it would be nice to have a feature that gives me an option to post to Steemit/Busy.org rather than doing it automatically. Or when on busy/steemit, have a filter to display only certain posts

These are good suggestions.. i couldnt agree more

I think this idea goes in the right direction. I do like your app, it works quite well, but yes I wish it didn't show as just another blog entry unless I choose for it to do that. I don't really have a suggestion for a better idea though.

You are right about everything except one. This is not my app. The app belongs to steepshot :p

That'd be nice. The problem of the feed showing everything that's shared has been adressed somewhere else... I'd like the posibilty of creating different categories of content so the followers were able to choose what they want to see. Imagine that i like to cook and play music. The people who like my food may think that I have awfull musical taste and not be interested in seeing the music related content. I don't know if that can be done using the tags or another metod...

I feel the same way. If it would only appear to steepshot users I´d be happy to use it. But in general I´m trying to do a concius effort to step up in the quality of the content I share here in steemit, and steepshot makes very easy to go the other way. I´d be happy to hear that i´m wrong. :)

You are not wrong.. if anything, you are absolutely right. Kindly Check my reply on the matter to see if it addresses your concerns.

Yes. I agree. I think it would be good if they operated separately from Steemit. I also think it would be good if they could be integrated such that if I wanted to see Steepshot or Dtube etc items in my feed I could.

I do not feel that this is the application of an easy path within steemit, as mentioned by certain participants. I think it is an alternative to create content of different quality, for those who are not 100% expressive with words, but if with other types of art.

Aah yes.. steepshot is for those who use instagram and is designed to attract such people who are all about pictures. But like i have said in response to another comment, the better way will be to detach such platforms from steemit so that like minded users can use their platforms without having to get infuriated over getting feed they dont want.

Appreciate the updates and the behind the scenes work being done @steepshot ~ do you have an idea of when UK/USA apple accounts will have access to the app? The web based entry on my iPhone/iPad seem to compress the quality of my images - anyone else having an issue?
Thanks guys!

Hi carrie, thank you for the comment.. i have no clue when the app is going to be available on UK / US app stores. Steepshot is still under beta testing and probably will roll out updates soon.
As far as image compression is concerned, i havent come across anyone with this issue..
but one thing is for sure, images are always compressed when uploaded online because you might have access to unlimited bandwidth with high speed but the other users may dont have the same. So in order to make the data available for everyone, most online social media sites use certain compression techniques.. this is a good question, i will ask steepshot about it and hopefully will be able to come up with a more satisfactory answer..

Best wishes..

Thanks @jbn.. I’ve been using my iPad Pro when posting and I’ve found that when I’m creating a post on @Steepshot , the image is super compressed and, yet, creating the same post on @Steemit the image quality is hd 🤷🏻‍♀️ I was just curious to see if anyone else had this issue >> again, I appreciate your time!

I'm not really a picture guy. I don't even use Instagram.

But judging from your review, Steepshot seems to be a wortwhile platform

Me neither .. i tried using instagram but couldnt attach myself to it. However there is a vast majority on steemit who are pictorial bloggers and quite frankly they are being spanked for getting rewards over just “one picture”, whereas the rest of us bloggers take 2-3 hours to craft a post to get some rewards.

However everything aside, this is a great platform for promotion of steem blockchain.. and if we want people to leave instagram and join steemit, this will have to do it..

However there is a vast majority on steemit who are pictorial bloggers and quite frankly they are being spanked for getting rewards over just “one picture”, whereas the rest of us bloggers take 2-3 hours to craft a post to get some rewards.

Every one earns rewards in different ways. There's something about the art of photography, that touches the soul.
Picture blogs are okay for me.

I agree with Steepshot being a great way to promote the Steem blockchain.
Anything to get the photo maniacs on steemit.

That is indeed great..
Didn't know you could use more tags..
Steemit is replacing the entire social media

20 tags are good. Right? More visibility and better categorization...

Definitely good..
Does it apply to dtube,zappl etc also or is it a special feature of steepshot

Nope. Its just confined to steepshot only.. its because instagram gives you the option of so many tags so i believe that the steepshot went in the same direction..

Ok..
Thanks for taking the time :)

Lets see, i just opened an account.

Let me know how you feel about steepshot.. ^_^

Does anyone else have trouble uploading photos with the web version? I always get the infinitely spinning wheel.

Naah.. didn’t encounter such error.. you might wanna consider changing your browser?? What browser you are using right now?

I'm using Firefox.

Try using chrome.. i use safari and didnt encounter any problem..

OK, I'll try that and see if it makes a difference.

Signed up, and pretty happy with it so far. I would like to see the option to schedule posts.

The platform is still in beta and i am sure we will see alot of great features in future including schedule posts..

Just saw this as a facebook ad! Awesome :)

Really? By “this” you means steepshot or this post? Can you make a screenshot for me? ^_^

Sorry I saw this comment a bit late. I saw a facebook ad and clicked it and I came here. No idea how to find it now.

@jbn ..Great information about steepshot...
It's really need for anyone...
Thanks for sharing it...

Thank you very much.. i appreciate it ^_^