OpenBenches

Thanks for sharing your photo of a bench. Unfortunately, Apple removes location information when you share a photo in your web browser.

If you want to share from your iPhone or iPad, here’s how to do it.

In your photo library, share the photo:

Share the photo to “Save to Files”:

In OpenBenches, select “Choose File” to share the image:

If you’re still having trouble, make sure your photos are being saved in “Most Compatible” format.

Alternatively, you can install this iOS shortcut to convert photos to JPG.

If that doesn’t work, please contact us.

For the last year-and-a-bit, Liz and I have been running OpenBenches.org. An open data website dedicated to memorial benches.

Here are some rough and ready numbers about how it has gone so far.

9,870 Benches

At the time of writing, we’re a little shy of 10,000 benches. As you can see, we have photos from all around the world.

9,000 UK Benches

The majority of our benches are in the UK. Memorial benches seems like a peculiarly Anglosphere habit. I’ve spoken to people from all sorts of different countries, and they really are rare outside the English-speaking world.

110 Registered Users

That’s over a hundred people signing in with Twitter. We’ve recently added Auth0 support, so people can sign in with Facebook and GitHub.

We also added a leaderboard so that our mate Jenny could see how many photos she added in Edinburgh.

We still have lots of anonymous users.

21,840 Photographs

Most benches have two photos – one of the inscription, and then another of either the whole bench or a view from the bench.

We also have panoramic shots like this:

66GB of Photos

All that media is pretty weighty. Modern camera phones take high-res photos, and a typical shot is around 4MB.

At the moment, our hosting provider is holding up. Huge shout out to Krystal Hosting – use discount code EDENT for £5 off.

I am looking at using Cloudinary to speed up resizing and delivery. But at close to $100 a month, that’s too much for a small hobby project.

Hundreds of Moo Cards

https://twitter.com/edent/status/1049036744581165057
Get 25% off your first Moo Card order!

261 Commits, and 8 GitHub contributors

The whole site is open source on GitHub – and it has been lovely using the issues tab to discuss where the site should go next.

Lots of Fun

But, most importantly, it has been a lot of fun. It’s wonderful seeing people from around the planet contributing. Thank you to everyone who has submitted a bench, shared our links, or generally been supportive of this daft little endeavour.

Here are some of the benches which made us smile:

And, finally, Liz and her mum in New Zealand – sat on the bench dedicated to Liz’s grandparents.

A few weeks ago, we were interviewed by BBC Radio Orkey! They did a lovely feature on OpenBenches and some of the benches on their gorgeous island.

https://twitter.com/edent/status/889875468194893824

You can listen to the interview:

Well, that went a little better than expected 🙂

We started off with a bare-bones alpha, scrappy logo, and some imported Open Data. We’ve now got nearly 2,000 benches added from all over the world.

You can check out the code on GitHub, but here’s a quick summary of the changes.

• New logo and theme.
• Better Unicode support – a surprising number of benches have emoji.
• Location finding – see benches near you.
• Vastly improved upload experience – preview images before they’re sent & check for metadata.
• More Schema.org metadata

This is the alpha release of OpenBenches. It is a quick hack as a proof of concept. The code is freely available at GitHub – contributions welcome!

What Works

• View benches on a map.
• Add a bench.

ToDo

• Admin interface / moderation.
• Search for inscription.
• Search for location.
• UI.

Inspiration

• George Julian’s wonderful blog.
• OpenPlaques.