Rethinking Upload Media on FindMyShots

Inside the Photos section, the work was split across two tabs. Upload Media was where you pushed photos and videos up to an event. My Gallery was where you looked back at what you'd already shot. Two tabs, but really one job: uploading your media and seeing your media are the same thing from a photographer's point of view, and the split just made you toggle between them. You couldn't check what you'd uploaded without leaving the place you uploaded from, and you couldn't upload without leaving the place that showed your work.

So the tabs collapsed into one. The Photos tab now drops you straight into the event's gallery, where the albums, the drop zone, and everything you've already uploaded sit on the same page.

The whole thing runs on a single event card that changes with the event's state, so one component covers every situation a photographer lands in. If the event is published and open, the card offers to upload, and once you've contributed it keeps an upload button up top with a way to view the album underneath. If you haven't registered for an upcoming event yet, it asks you to register first. If the upload window has closed, it drops the upload action and just lets you view what's there. Even an unpublished event stays reachable to the organization that owns it. The card carries the event's identity the whole time, its title, shot count, date, location, and organizer, and swaps only its main action. There's no separate upload screen to go find. The action lives on the event itself.

Before touching any screens, I mapped the whole thing out as a user journey, the old flow on top and the revised one below.

The old flow runs clean right up until the upload hits a duplicate, and then it forks into a dead end. Both choices the user is offered, view the event album or upload to another album, throw them back to the start to try again. Laying it out this way is what made the real problem obvious. It was never the error itself. It was that recovering from the error cost the user everything they'd already done.

The revised flow keeps everything on one page. The albums and the drop box live together, the toast updates the list as files come in, and that same duplicate now shows up as a row in the toast with a fix right there. The user never leaves, and can keep uploading to other albums.

Underneath the specific changes, there were three ideas I kept checking my decisions against.

Before, you picked an album first and then uploaded. Now you start inside the album and upload from there.

The album list sits on the left, searchable, with a count next to each one. The drop zone belongs to whichever album you're in. If you're in Main Album, files drop into Main Album.

The list stays put as you click around, so you're not stuck with one album for the whole session. Finish in one, click into the next, keep dropping. Nothing resets, and you can always see where a photo is going.

This matters most when an event has a lot of albums. The full list is always right there, so you never have to leave what you're doing to go find it.

The toast is now the upload interface, not just a notification. It works like Google Drive. Each file gets its own row in a stack in the corner.

Each row shows its own state: still uploading, done, or failed. You can dismiss any of them with an ×. When they all finish, the toast collapses to one line. It never blocks the page.

Because the toast handles all of this, I removed two things.

First, the Upload button. Dropping files already starts the upload, so there was no reason to press a second button after.

Second, the success pop-up. The old 'Upload Complete' modal only told you what the toast was already showing, so I cut it. Now the last row just turns to Uploaded and you keep going.

Errors work the same way. Before, one duplicate closed the modal and sent you back to the start, losing the whole queue. Now a bad file is just one row with an error and a fix. The rest keep uploading, and you handle the one file without leaving the page.

There used to be a separate page just for large uploads, up to 500 photos at once. It existed because the normal upload couldn't handle that volume yet. So photographers had to pick between normal upload and bulk upload before they started.

Once the normal upload could handle the volume, the separate page wasn't needed.

So I removed it. The 500-photo limit now lives on the normal drop zone. A small drop and a huge drop go to the same place, and photographers no longer have to choose which tool to use.

Photographers upload videos too, not just photos. So under the drop zone, Your Uploads shows everything in one grid. A filter at the top switches between All, Photos, and Videos, each with a count. You can see what you've uploaded without leaving the album.

Mobile works the same way. The album list moves into a menu, the event details stack into pills, and the grid becomes two columns. The drop zone, filter, and toast all stay. There's no separate mobile version to maintain.