See more on SkySee

After I released the first version of SkySee - see skysee.ch - I quickly received feedback, and also felt myself, the limits of a pure SHV number based tagging. To recap, Swiss glider pilots are obligated to put their Swiss paragliding/delta association (SHV) membership number on the down-facing side of their glider, for accountability purposes. The original SkySee idea was to repurpose this number for sharing flight photos among pilots.

However, depending on the perspective, in dynamic situations, or from far away, the letters can not always be read easily; especially on snapshots or videos with limited resolution. In addition, there are plans to replace the physical SHV number with an electronic identification system in the next few years: so the days of SHV number tagging would be limited anyway.

So a few users and I had some ideas what to do about it, and I ended up implementing some that have turned out to work great. Mostly, those ideas have existed in other products for a long time though, but with a clever twist we can make them even more useful for paragliding.

The existing home feed, showing new photos and videos that others have taken of you - matched by your SHV number. Nevermind the strange tags; this is just my test instance!

The new upload form, allowing to manually set the location even when there is no EXIF information available.

The big change is an increased focus on time/location based discovery. This means that not only the photographer can tag pilots on their photos; now, pilots also can tag themselves if they find themselves in a public upload. That’s just a business logic change, though. The big UI change is a new Discovery page, which simply lets pilots select a date range and a place, showing all (public) uploads taken in the given area:

It’s not just the Swisstopo map that’s popular with most outdoors folks here in Switzerland, but especially the opportunity to upload an IGC file that I’m happy about here. IGC files are the main format for storing and sharing (para)gliding flight tracks, and are recorded by any serious flight computer. When provided with an IGC file, SkySee shows the (downsampled) track and any uploads that were taken along the track, with a certain time and space tolerance. This is especially useful for finding media that was taken when flying close to other pilots, like in thermals and on soaring sites. You can also see the new Tag Myself button, allowing pilots to tag themselves even if they were not identifiable to the photographer.

And of course I’ve ensured that previewing uploads is simple, with a LiveView-based modal available, to avoid having to switch pages for every item.

All of this has contributed to increased uptake among fellow members of the paragliding club I’m a member of, as well as the random pilots I’m talking to every time I fly. Over the coming weeks and months I hope to sign on more regular users to build a community regularly uploading photos and videos, and provide some “base coverage” of the good flying days in spring and summer.

Want to join SkySee? Sign up here, but only if you’re a licensed pilot or student and member of SHV!