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Select — Beautiful new tab with personalized photo categories
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Replies
Maker
Thanks @olivier_amar - 100% agree, seeing a beautiful photo every time you open a new tab is much more inspiring than a white page with a big search bar.
Another great hunt, @benln.
Congrats, @liorgrossman. Stunning photos and great design as expected.
How do you curate the photos and from where (if it's OK to ask)?
Maker
@sageeb - of course!
Finding and curating the photos is actually quite a process :)
The photos are currently hand-curated from 500px and Flickr.
I'm performing search on specific themes, as opposed to looking at photos in general.
I've built an internal tool that helps rule out bad photos (low resolution, portrait instead of landscape, commercial license), and import the great few photos to Select.
The curation itself is a work of art, and a LOT of work, I think 1 out of 1000 photos reviewed or make it to Select.
Finding photos which are REALLY beautiful (wow effect), great in terms of quality (minimal noise, good lighting, great focus, high resolution) and not overprocessed (extreme HDR or photoshop) is quite a challenge.
A worthy challenge nevertheless - if a picture is worth a 1000 words, a GREAT picture is worth at least 10,000 ;)
Maker
Thanks for the hunt @benln!
Hey everyone!
I’m Lior, the creator behind Darkness and Wikiwand, and today I’m excited to introduce you to “Select”, which I’ve been working on for the past couple of months.
Select is a beautiful new tab extension that shows you the world’s most stunning photos.
You can personalize it by choosing from 20 different photo categories: beautiful beaches, wild landscapes, night scenery, underwater life, adorable pets, sports cars and many others. The free version includes the 5 most popular categories, and the Pro version includes all categories.
I’ve made the quality of photos my top priority - all photos are carefully curated, so you can enjoy the most beautiful photos imaginable (in crisp Full HD resolution).
The interface is extremely clean and minimalistic so you can fully enjoy the photos, and so your new tab loads as fast as possible
I would love to hear your feedback and answer your questions!
Maker
Thanks @genadyo - all the background are currently photos, we'll consider adding additional categories for videos and animations in the future.
@eytanlevit even suggested a category for aerial slow-motion videos like the Apple TV screensaver:
Maker
Thank you @haimpekel - my focus was finding and curating photos that make you go "wow", while keeping the extension's interface as minimalistic as possible.
Maker
@taramann Thank you Tara! Any other photo categories you'd like to see in the future? (in addition to the 20 existing categories)
This is a really nice looking extension 👍 I think it would be good if it showed a different picture with each tab though - it looks like it just shows the same picture every time?
Which license are these images under?
Also, this is the first new tab extension I've seen with a free and paid version! I'd be interested to hear how successful it is 💰
Maker
Thanks for the kind words @marsh931
Select chooses a new picture to show on a daily basis. To be percise - it changes the picture every 24 hours.
All the images selected are free for commercial use, mostly creative commons (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) or public domain.
Extensions such as the popular Momentum also use the free/paid pricing model. Momentum Plus costs $30/yr, but it also offers a lot of functionality that is unavailable on Select, such as integration with Trello/Todoist/etc, custom quotes, advanced todo list and notes inside, etc.
I preferred to keep Select minimalistic and focused on pictures, as opposed to making it a fullly-fledged productivity app, and the pricing for Pro is more modest at $3.99/yr.
How does it work? Too soon to tell. We have 1000 beta users so far and 15 are paying users. Let's revisit this again when Select gets to 10,000 users :)
@liorgrossman Thanks for your answers :) I'd be really interested to know how things are looking at 10,000 users :)
XPRS