Photo sharing social media with friends reimagined, combining privacy and flexibility. See photos from friends, not from advertisers or influencers.
In the modern world, everything has a "story" feature, are filled with influencers, "suggested posts", advertising...
Things needed to be simpler. Things needed to be private. Things needed to go back to the way they were. That's why Picar was built!
Only see posts from friends, and in chronological order. Only share photos to friends, not publicly or to "followers".
We used React.js for frontend, and Node.js/Express/RedisStack for the backend. More specifically, we utilized RedisJSON to store everything and RediSearch to query for it.
A lot of more detail into how this was built, architecture, and Redis usage can be found in the Backend Github Repo
Here's a short video that explains the project and how it uses Redis:
How it works
How the data is stored:
There are several different schemas of entites that we store. They are all available in more detail at /schema/<ENTITY_HERE>.
Note: The app only supports logging in with Google.
User: Main user entity
Fields
sub (string): The unique idenfier for each user Google gives
email (string): Email of the user. Also provided by Google.
username (string): Username that represents the user. This is by default first name + last name's initial (provided by Google). This can be changed afterwards.
friendIds (string[]): String array of friends (by userId) that this…