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p/maculaDon't give away your content. Share on your terms.
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Elena Tairova

Macula - Don't give away your content, share on your terms

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Stress-free asset management built for creators. Safely store your multimedia, with Macula's IPFS-based double backup. Choose what you want to share and set a license. Share anywhere with Unilink - we'll show how your content performs and who's using it.

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Elena Tairova
Maker
📌
Hi, Product Hunters! 👋 Really excited to finally share with you what we've been working on for a while — a better way to manage and share your content — Why Macula? 🤔👁️ The life of a content creator is reliant on exposure. On the one hand, you're always looking for ways to gain more visibility, hoping for people to spot and appreciate your work. On the other hand, the more you share, the greater the risk of unauthorized use and loss of control over your creations. Further amplified by the rise of AI algorithms hungry for training data (a.k.a. content scraping), on top of the longstanding problem of "freebooting" that has plagued creators for years. — Growth or Control? For creators, it's a frustrating choice: sacrifice rights for potential growth, or stifle reach to protect your work. This is a bad business model for the creative economy. — We say Both! We believe you shouldn't have to choose. Creators should be able to grow their audience without compromising their rights and set their terms for the content they share. 🔗©️ >> And that's exactly why we built Macula. A future-proof content management tool for creators designed to let you focus on what matters most: creating. Meanwhile, we take care of all the boring (yet super important) stuff. ✅ We've got all the functionality you'd expect from a typical digital asset management platform: asset management, image editing, on-the-fly optimization, analytics, and sharing. ➕✨ And much more: ©️🦹 Metadata Hero: copyright info automatically embedded for your work (readable by humans & machines). No more "borrowing" without credit! ‍ Set your license terms & ensure proper attribution when your work is shared. 🔗©️ Universal Links: Smart gateways for your content. Share anywhere (websites, apps, social media) with copyright info intact! ✅ 👁️Track Your Impact: Built-in analytics with UTM code support. Run targeted marketing campaigns without relying on 3rd party tools. (basic UI for now, soon to be improved) 🥳 To celebrate World Art Day (and, of course, our launch too) the first 100 to sign up for Macula will get a generous upgrade: >> The Macula 'Free+ Extra Storage' is the perfect starter plan for photographers and visual artists, designed to help you grow. All the features of the standard free plan, plus: ➕an increased 10 GB of storage space, ➕larger upload file sizes, ➕and boosted bandwidth. That said, Macula is currently in Beta and completely FREE to use. 🖥️Heads up: It's currently a web app. We recommend desktop over mobile for a better experience. We're still in early development with plenty of ideas brewing! Check out our feature roadmap to see what's in the works: https://kelp.notion.site/b7a6acd... 🙌Your feedback is our rocket fuel! Let us know what you think! - feel free to DM me on X / LinkedIn - or shoot us an email to hey @ macula.link Try Macula now - https://macula.link/ See our docs for guidance and more: https://www.notion.so/kelp/97440... Cheers, Elena
Coral Lauren
@eltairovy Congratulations for the launch! Love the idea of using IPFS as storage. How do you make sure files keep getting "pinned" and remain stored in some nodes? Are you running your own node?
Daniel Maricic
Maker
@eltairovy @laurencoral Hi, thanks for the comment and the question. Yes, we are running a multinode IPFS cluster ourselves. They are on two different physical geolocations, both in the EU. Every file, published or not, is pinned two times in our network, and then an encrypted CAR is created from the original file stored on the third provider (9nines of durability).
Coral Lauren
@eltairovy @woss Thanks for the reply! Running your own multinode is the best way to ensure files are pinned! My only concern with this approach is that eventually there could be an issue with your node and third party nodes are not storing your files. This is my main concern re: IPFS in general, it's fantastic but to ensure storage of specific files one has to run their own nodes. I wonder if there is a broader solution to the problem. i.e. how can we ensure theoretically "eternal" storage even if our nodes disappear.
Daniel Maricic
Maker
@laurencoral I don't think the third-party backup will fail, it's AWS. We plan to support additional pinning through the Pinning Service implementation which the IPFS clearly defines. In this case, anybody can pin their files indefinitely on their nodes or Filecoin, web3.storage, Crust network ...
Elena Tairova
Maker
@olegdiz thanks Oleg! glad to hear such feedback 😃
Clayton Walker
Congrats on the launch guys! I’ve been eagerly awaiting this one from seeing your posts about it on the discussion boards. I’ve signed up and am excited to put it to the test.
Daniel Maricic
Maker
@claytonwalker thanks for the comment and the signup. If you have any questions please let us know. We would appreciate the feedback 🙌
Clayton Walker
@woss will do. I will check it out tomorrow when I wake up. Good luck on the launch, you’ve got a good team to take this to the top 🤝
Roman Martirosyan
Congratulations on the launch, team! I'm particularly intrigued by the Metadata Hero feature; how does it ensure comprehensive protection against content misuse across different platforms?
Daniel Maricic
Maker
@r_martirosyan Hey, thanks for the comment. It's an excellent question! Each Unilink ( published file ) contains two important fields, `restrictFrom` and `allowFrom`. Both of the settings are by default "permissive", this means that the file can be accessed from anywhere. Setting the `restrictFrom` to something like `["*.domain.com"]` prevents the file access from the domain.com and all its subdomains. Setting the `allowFrom` to something like `["*.woss.photo"]` allows access to the file ONLY from the woss.photo and its subdomains. We evaluate "restrictions" first then "allow" rules when the file is accessed. We also log this so the creators can see if somebody is trying to use their files where they shouldn't be used. I hope this clarifies and hopefully answers your question.
Alex Shapoval
Maker
@r_martirosyan hi, Roman! Thanks for the question! Macula automatically embeds licensing metadata into all published files and transformations. This means you don’t have to maintain the licensing details yourself and keep it up to date for different versions of the image. Then you can share the file with Macula Universal Links that make the metadata readable by both machines and people. A nice bonus is that all images shared with Macula get a Licensable badge in Google Images with licensing details right there!
Alex Shapoval
Maker
Hey everyone! This day has finally come; we've launched Macula on Product Hunt. It was a learning experience for all of us; after all, building products that aim to solve real problems (including your own problems) is not easy! But at the end of the day, it's extremely rewarding to complete another milestone and show your hard work to the world. For a quick glance on how awesome Macula is, take a look at my public profile: https://u.macula.link/@alxwnth/ Let's use this launch as an opportunity to raise more awareness and urge more people to take control over their content and share on their terms!
Nolan Wang
Congrats on launching Elena, Alex, Daniel! @eltairovy @alxwnth @woss This is awesome, imo something like this should be the go-to solution for all creators in today's AI world. Curious how you guys think about go to market for users??
Elena Tairova
Maker
@nolan_wang Thanks Nolan! And good question! The plan is to start with the creators who are most annoyed by their work being used without permission (including by AI) and scale up from there. While Macula currently focuses more on visual creators, the music industry seems to be in desperate need of a solution, and the market (though admittedly messy) holds great promise.
Oleg K
Macula looks like an interesting app. I like the idea of having automatic backups and copyright protection, so you don't have to do anything yourself. I take a lot of photos, and backing them up is always a pain. I'm going to try it out today, and congratulations on the launch!
Alex Shapoval
Maker
@radiokot thank you, Oleg! I hope you like the experience and be sure to write a review on the product page!
Aman Wen
Absolutely intriguing concept, Macula! Leveraging IPFS for double backup seems like a solid approach to asset management, and the licensing aspect is a thoughtful touch. It's particularly interesting how creators maintain control over their content distribution. My question is: How does the Unilink feature track content performance in real-time, and how granular are the analytics provided? Can't wait to learn more about it!
Daniel Maricic
Maker
@aman_wen Hi Arman, great question. I'll try to keep it simple without too much tech talk. About real-time; We built an in-house analytics system exclusively for Unilink with the QuestDB, so ingestion is insanely fast and reading even faster. About granularity: Since we don't use cookies, we rely on what the browser tells us, mainly referrer and origin headers. We track the complete user-agent info and can distinguish bots from real traffic (bot detection is always improving). Additionally, for non-EU we store IP and map that to the GeoLocation. Also, we track our internal URLSearch Params (width, height, sharpen, ...) as all utm_* and "ref". We also track when the Twitter button I pressed and consider that as a share, in the future we plan to implement double-checking for the tweet and mastodon instances. Hope that answers the question :)
Daniel Maricic
Maker
I created the idea behind Macula almost 10 years ago. The idea was simple; I wanted to share my photos under my terms on social media with least effort. Today finally I have a centralized place from which I can access my photos and videos using the API and share them with the world under the correct license. In the upcoming week, I am redesigning the https://woss.photo from a statically built git repo ( 1.5 GB ) where all images are stored on github to an API-based Macula solution ( 1.1 MB ) where images are hosted on IPFS with the ability to resize them and optimize for different screen sizes. I will also write a tutorial and probably make a video on how to do it. Please leave a replay of what you prefer to see first, a video or textual tutorial 🙂 And finally my Macula public page: https://u.macula.link/@woss/
Nikita Detkov
Your product showcases ingenuity! The concept is intriguing. I'm curious, what exciting milestones or features are you planning for the next phase of development? Keep up the great work!
Alex Shapoval
Maker
@detkov Thanks for the comment, Nikita! We have a lot of improvements on our roadmap, mainly improving performance and polishing UX. And, of course, we're going to take into the account all the feedback we've got so far!
Uthupios
Congratulations @eltairovy on the launch.. This product looks exactly what today's content creators want and need. I which you more progress and success and Good luck with your product.
Elena Tairova
Maker
@uthupia_admin thank you! appreciate it 🙌
Rihana Chase
The idea is interesting But please explain a little more fundamentally
Elena Tairova
Maker
@rihana_chase please see my first comment, that pinpoints the overall idea. And then, to learn how it works in detail, you can always reffer to our docs: https://kelp.notion.site/97440d2... Hope this helps 🙂
Michel Tibaux
Great product for ensuring future-proof legal security of copyright on creators' shared work, together with a wide variety of choice of licensing terms. Congrats!
Morris
Congratulations on the well-deserved recognition on Product Hunt!
Daniel Maricic
Maker
@morrisz thanks :)
Thor Schaeff
Congrats on the launch, this looks great 🤩 And thanks for using and shouting out Supabase 💚
Elena Tairova
Maker
@schaeff_t thanks, Thor! Appreciate the support! And Supabase services, of course🫡