Finding a name
Picasa was named for a painter. I wanted the same for its successor, and then I had to make sure nobody else was using it.
Picasa’s name was a play on Picasso. I liked that, and asked for names in the same spirit: an artist or a photographer, adapted into something short and ownable.
Seura
Of the candidates, Seura stuck. It comes from Georges Seurat, the painter who made pictures out of thousands of small dots of color, which is not a bad description of a digital photograph. I also had Claude check two other candidates I liked, Daguera and Talba, but Seura was the one.
One complication: seura.app is already taken, by a Spanish app for running sports clubs over WhatsApp. That’s why the full name is Seura Photos, which is clearer anyway. I decided to go with it, knowing we could change it later if we had to.
Checking that nobody else owns it
A name you’re going to put on a public website deserves at least a basic trademark check. For a free open-source project, the free public databases are a reasonable level of care. (Neither Claude nor I is a lawyer, and if Seura ever became commercial, I’d have an attorney do a proper search.)
The key thing I learned is that trademarks are about what a name is used for. Registrations are grouped into numbered classes of goods and services, and two businesses can usually share a name if they’re in unrelated fields. For software, the classes that matter are 9 (downloadable software) and 42 (software services).
Here’s what I found:
| Search | What turned up | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| “Seura” in the US trademark database | One live registration, SÉURA, in class 20: furniture, mirrors, and frames. The accent doesn’t make it a different name. | Different field; low risk |
| “Seurat” in classes 9 and 42 | One company making industrial 3D printers and their software | Different product and buyers; low risk |
| “Sura” in classes 9 and 42 | Five marks: university research, massage devices, dog training, an online drama series, a medical practice | No conflict |
| WIPO Global Brand Database (international) | The same US registration, plus one expired registration in Japan | No conflict |
Nothing in software or photography. The name stays.
The organization
The project lives in a GitHub organization, seura-photos, with one repository for the app and one for the edit format. This site lives there too, at seuraphotos.app.
Next: an opinionated interface.