Photography

Excited to introduce Photocaster, an image focused Farcaster client that allows you to post high resolution photos. Let’s talk more about it!

Excited to introduce Photocaster, an image focused Farcaster client that allows you to post high resolution photos. Let’s talk more about it!
https://photocaster.xyz

DX Engineer | Head of Developer Relations at /pinata | Building orbiter.host | stevedylan.dev/links

Before we get into anything else as you start trying this client out, please be aware that posts will take a while to show up on Warpcast as they’re trying to catch up on messages. There might be a delay of a few hours before you see something!

Head of Developer Relations at @pinatacloud | Technical Writer | Building honeythread.xyz | stevedylan.dev

Oof, quality took a hit :( Thinking a fun project I might take up is a mini Farcaster client that purely lets user cast full res images to the photography channel 👀 cc @usersteen.eth

Something that always bothered me when posting images to Warpcast was the quality. Anytime I had larger photos they got squashed hard and it wasn’t great to see.

Something that always bothered me when posting images to Warpcast was the quality. Anytime I had larger photos they got squashed hard and it wasn’t great to see. 
https://warpcast.com/stevedylandev.eth/0x5b85d385

This prompted me to build a simple cast launcher that could send high res images as casts. The goal was to keep the quality without sacrificing performance. How? IPFS.

Images uploaded to Photocaster are stored on IPFS as intact full res images, so at any time you can use the CID to get the raw content yourself.

With Photocaster you’ll see an expand button for any images using IPFS, and clicking on it will expand it to the full resolution. This is such a great use case for IPFS in Farcaster and was pleasant to build.

This was also a great experience to test out the Pinata hub with a full end to end client that creates casts as well as renders them. Definitely check it out if you haven’t

This was also a great experience to test out the Pinata hub with a full end to end client that creates casts as well as renders them. Definitely check it out if you haven’t 
https://pinata.cloud/pinata-hub

I plan to open source the repo as well as write a blog post on how it was built soon! How much this is maintained will vary as it serves more as a demo, and would highly recommend Tiles by @brianjckim as a mature photo client. If anything I hope it inspired other clients to marry IPFS with Farcaster for media!

On the flip side, how do we keep clients from lagging over the size? IPFS Dedicated Gateways. Pinata’s Dedicated Gateways have image optimization built in, so the link used in the cast is an optimized version.