Agreed. Flickr is $25 for unlimited storage. That's much better than S3 AFAIK. Especially in this day and age when I go out with my DSLR and come back with 4gig of new images.
Here's one datapoint: I have 652,082 images in my account, and have downloaded my entire library a number of times using different 3rd party utilities. Haven't ever had an issue.
> Also, good luck dowloading your whole photo collection from Flickr.
I periodically fire up an EC2 instance and do just that via the API.
> It may say unlimited, but only a fool would believe it. How many photos do you have uploaded anyway?
Unlike your average "unlimited" shared web hosting, I've yet to hear of a single person booted off Flickr for uploading too much (legit) stuff. Storage is cheap, and the folks paying $25 to upload a photo a month likely subsidize the really heavy users a little.
In theory, yes. But there are a plentiful of Flickr users who grudgingly renew their Flickr account because they don't see any alternatives that includes porting their photos.
The solutions exist. But no one knows about them. I believe this is a big problem and we're baking data portability right into the service.
If Flickr had a big button that said, export all of your photos then I imagine people would.
And by export I don't mean download zip file. I mean move where your photos are stored without losing the benefits of having them "up in the cloud".
I don't know that it has to defeat every proprietary system in order to be successful and it doesn't happen over night. I can tell you that from what our customers are saying that the value proposition is becoming extremely clear. It's been challenging because the concepts aren't always easy to explain. But as with any model that's drastically different it takes time for folks to warm up to it. That was always the biggest hurdle. But I can say that it is happening in a real and measurable way.
You don't even need a Dropbox account. You can use storage provided by the hosted solution at Whig point is is like Flickr or Picasa with the exception that you can easily migrate the location of your photos without any disruption.
I think to defeat Picasa and Flickr, first, it has to actually be known about...
The reasons given in the article are well, nice enough features, but they're absolutely not enough to guarantee success or domination... not even close. Major success is of course extremely fickle; it's not just major features that are important but all sorts of incidental stuff. In many cases, much of this comes down to luck as much as anything else (e.g. FB's big advantage was being in the right place, at the right time, and not screwing up that advantage completely), and is notoriously hard to predict.
Same here, never heard of them. Don't really see anything in the article that could somehow get their name to the huge masses of people who know Facebook, and maybe Flickr, and don't really hunt around for advanced options. Instagram at least had the public feeds and following and some sort of way for it to spread. You can't win this by building a better photo tool alone.
Nothing guarantees success. Having a radically different approach to an existing problem and getting people on board who understand it is a first step.
I'm the founder of the project. Benjamin is one of our community managers and I'm glad he wrote this.
The value of OpenPhoto differs for many people. Benjamin stated why he uses it and even volunteers his time to help make it successful.
What I'm focusing on is making it easy and useful for people to regain control and peace of mind that all their photos are safe, in one spot and enjoyable.
We are doing this a few different ways.
* As the article points out, letting users (optionally) choose whee their photos are stores. I say optionally because we provide storage for those who don't know what that means or don't want to.
* Allow people to import photos from Flickr, Instagram and Facebook. More coming soon.
* Enable folks to change their mind at any time with their choice of storage service. If they choose us and want to change or find a different service that is cheaper or suits them better, we make the migration seamless.
We're an open source project but as you'll see we are very consumer focused. It's why we have apps on the app stores and offer a "hosted version".
> Benjamin is one of our community managers and I'm glad he wrote this.
You shouldn't, really, the hyperbolic tone is monopolizing all the discussion. Hardly anyone here seems to have even heard of OpenPhoto, so starting with "Unless you've been living in a cave" is basically insulting to everyone.
Be modest, focus on the value of your project and don't insult your readers, much less the readers that might want to become users.
Sorry it took 6 hours to import your photos from Facebook. We didn't anticipate having so many people initiate imports so we throttled ourselves a bit much (on top of 3rd party API limits).
Besides the delay in imports was there anything else you found frustrating?
Thanks! The signup page ( https://openphoto.me/signup ) isn't arranged like a typical pricing / signup page. I think people expect something more like the following:
The problem with things like this is that it's doubtful whether this product will be ten times better than the alternatives, which is how much better it needs to be if it wants to displace the entrenched players, which already enjoy some lock-in through 3rd party integration. Simply offering a cheaper and open source alternative or a free alternative that requires somebody to link it up with Dropbox doesn't cut it. There has to be a killer feature, in my opinion.
Your average user will initially shop around for a service, stick with the one they find, and stop then simply stop considering alternatives unless the alternative is simply amazing or all their friends are using it.
Completely agree. We are enabling users to import from multiple sources. This seems to be the feature that resonates most with people - to get all their photos into one location.
Yeah, I had the same reaction - I have about 20 different camera apps on my iPhone, and all the typical flickr, pbase, shutterfly, picassa, photostream accounts that shutterbugs tend to pick up.
I read dpreview/techmeme/theverge daily, and I'd never heard of "OpenPhoto" before. I presume I'm the target audience for this new service, so it's probably not a great idea to start off a posting by simultaneously insulting me and losing credibility.
Even though it would be cool, I think that the situation is similar to Diaspora/Facebook, i.e. end users won't run their own servers and it would not be profitable for third parties to run them either.
And this is why it tugs at me. So for 5 years I grew a company that built an 'internet appliance' for the Small/Medium business market. Even am named on the patent we filed for lights-out / noconsole operation. The goal was to make a server that was dead simple for the end user (they just plugged it into their ISDN or T-1 connection and turned it on). All of the 'hard stuff' was done under the covers and far away. When I left I joined NetApp and spent 5 years making their storage appliances more scalable. The notion of an appliance, in the face of all that programmability, is hard to hold on to but its possible.
Most of the people today who use "computers", "running a computer" doesn't make sense. They turn it on, it works, the load apps, they use them. That is their entire experience. Tablets and smartphones are even more along this route. Few users of 'smartphones' think of them as computers they could open up a shell on, code up some program, compile it and execute it.
So from my history I can imagine this "thing" perhaps it looks like a furnace or a water cooler, its in grey industrial steel, has fins on it, and where a breaker box would have circuit breakers it has a box that holds disk drives, 10, 20 or 30 of them. And the drive boxes have a light that is either red, yellow, or green. "Technicians" can come to your house and swap out all of the units with red lights (or red/yellow) lights periodically like you change the filters on your furnace.
From an application perspective you have a web based email client (gmail like but running on your own appliance), you've got flickr, facebook, twilo, icloud, all those services you have now where the machine is in someone's data center, that machine is in a closet in your house somewhere. These things have uptime measured in years. You buy "service apps" and push them to your "home server" and "poof" you have access to that. It has all your media, it can send it to any device in your house.
From a policy perspective this makes things very clear, this unit is running in your house and is your property. There is no legal theory that allows someone to demand its contents without a warrant. From a media perspective it ties you to your media, there is no ambiguity about licenses or rights. You bought a movie, you can watch that movie. It 'servitizes' things which today are shipped as hardware, smart TV's set top boxes, game consoles, phones, etc.
I feel like this sort of server is certainly possible with today's software, and with a gigabit to your house it will make more sense than having your 'stuff' out there where someone like the FBI can accidentally take it down because there are other services running in the same rack they want.
The only thing missing from this picture at the moment is that folks don't see a value (well most folks) and until these are wide spread, the value proposition is primarily consolidation of your media and better privacy guarantees. That combined with the fact that it is hard to make a really lean hardware start up and that leaves you with slow to no adoption. Weirdly, Oracle could do this with their Sun assets but not sure they would want to.
Yes, I can imagine a high schooler running a server that not only maintains their facebook profile but provides a chat room and runs a home grown mmo ... what I can't imagine is their grandmother running a server. She needs/wants something that is easily farmed out to minimally trained technicians.
I think the primary difference is that Diaspora faced a chicken/egg problem which we don't. Social isn't the primary focus of what we're building so if you're the only person in the world using OpenPhoto you can derive a good deal of value from it on day 1.
I think there are other large challenges ahead of us but I don't think the Diaspora example is entirely accurate because what hurt them doesn't completely apply to us.
I'd bet against this happening... nobody knows about this.
Also, hasn't twitter, shared photo streams and Instagram/Facebook already "defeated" simple image hosting platforms?
I'm betting against that. Photos, unlike many other types of content, are not ephemeral. If you don't believe they are then ask anyone who takes photos of their kids.
It is often difficult to defend my thoughts with younger more technical groups. If all people care about really is sharing photos in the moment then I'm wrong and OpenPhoto will be a failure. I'm bullish.
>I'm betting against that. Photos, unlike many other types of content, are not ephemeral. If you don't believe they are then ask anyone who takes photos of their kids.
Only each and every hosting solution one might pick for OpenPhoto (S3, DropBox, their hosting company, whatever) is just as ephemeral as Flickr and Picassa. A lot of them even more so (I've seen tons of hosting companies close, Google can shut down Picassa like it has closed down lots of it's own products, Dropbox could get bought by the big players and close down, etc).
>It is often difficult to defend my thoughts with younger more technical groups.
And yet, those are the only part of the population that might be interested in a self-hosted, open source, photo hosting.
> Only each and every hosting solution one might pick for OpenPhoto (S3, DropBox, their hosting company, whatever) is just as ephemeral as Flickr and Picassa.
That's the benefit of de-coupling the data storage from the application logic. If you are using Dropbox and they announce they're shutting down you can seamlessly migrate your photos to another provider and experience no disruption in service.
The way it's done today is you have to export your photos from one service to another.
So, I was curious and tried installing it locally for a test drive.
The installation was painful (issues with imagemagick, for one). I installed from git, according to their installation guide [1].
The result is broken (for me/in general) on several levels. Let's start with the best one:
The configuration file that you generate during the intial setup of the application (from a UI. It's not my fault, I didn't miss anything, this file is totally autogenerated) has a different idea of the configuration parameter name for the password salt.
Result? The admin account ends up in the db unsalted (or .. whatever their configuration returns for 'value not configured'), because it searches for 'passwordSalt' in the config and previously just dropped a 'secret' in there.
Why did I even notice that? Because I was hoping to use that thing with my wife. Two accounts, both allowed to upload. Seems to be a concept that this project doesn't support: For all I can tell only _one_ user is allowed to upload pictures. You can have multiple (local) users, but for that you need to read the code and edit the config file directly. Yeah - and figure out the salt bug above.
Uploading failed with a division by zero error when I used ImageMagick as backend.
The gallery sometimes _didn't show the image, just the tags and the general UI around_ (in both Chrome and FF). Quite a bad thing, since that is the only usecase.
It took me ages to understand how to delete images. The only way I found is hidden in some 'batch manipulation' dialog.
I could go on. It feels unfinished and rough. It doesn't solve my basic needs. Replacing Picasa and Flickr would be great, but this app is from away from it.
OpenPhoto who? I had never heard of OpenPhoto until now, so I guess that kind of weakens the point of this article by about 50% straight up. Flickr in my opinion while having failed to stay relevant in a world of Instagrams and Facebook, it's still the best place to store your photos and from what I hear Marissa is focusing on Flickr quite heavily recently.
Free might seem better than $25 per month, but $25 per month for actual unlimited photo storage is something not even Dropbox or S3 can compete with. Not to mention Flickr has no barrier to entry, you upload your photos and don't have to worry about paying for a third party service like S3.
It's nice to dream that an open source Mozilla project can steal some of Flickr's thunder, but it isn't going to be happening any time soon.
> Currently Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr lack the same openness
What lack of openness exactly? I can go to Picasa at any time and download a fully original picture (the very same picture I uploaded to Google's servers). I also have an API I can use to access Picasa and Flickr.
> With all of the above reasons in mind and all the features that are being added its going to be hard to find any reason not to use OpenPhoto.
Yeah, Linux has been using the same tired argument for a couple of decades now. The bottom line is that "it's open and free" is not enough to convince millions of users to use your product.
> Note: I’m currently a member of the OpenPhoto Team
Ah... ok, I wish I had read this first and I wouldn't even have bothered posting this.
I believe the openness the author is talking about isn't merely the ability to get a photo back out. It's the ability to have your photos be portable. That you have the ability to store the photos wherever you'd like. And the ability for anyone else to clone and modify the application. And your ability to seamlessly start using that without having to download and upload your photos all over again.
Much of it is philosophical but if Flickr had embraced this model it wouldn't have stagnated for the last 5 years.
> Yeah, Linux ...
I know. We're trying to move away from open and free. In 4 weeks the name won't even have "Open" in it.
> Ah... ok, I wish I had read this first and I wouldn't even have bothered posting this.
Don't let this discredit the entire article. Even if you disagree with it there's some very forward thinking approaches to how to store and handle user data. The web would be a better place if applications in the future at least adopted parts of it.
Here is a hypothesis to examine - given the first computing revolution involved people determining how to use their computers by purchasing and installing software with the needed functionality, is a second such revolution where completely controllable personal storage and compute resources reside in the cloud, with individuals deciding how to put them to use by installing various server sofware components?
I'm personally sick of lockins and wouldnt mind a "desktop like" interface to installing and using software on servers. There were some startups that seemed to start down this path. Know of any that's moved further along in this direction?
This article has an asterisk at the beginning which leads to a footnote "Note: I’m currently a member of the OpenPhoto Team". This should be at the beginning, it sets the articles tone. I'd take it seriously if it was an outside source but being written by a developer on the project, for me it's a cute introduction to the software and it doesn't tell me whether this software is actually good.
What I do learn from this is that it would probably be a good solution for hack-it-yourself enthusiasts from the Linux community who always look for the open source solution.
>"OpenPhoto is Free Open Source Software that anyone can download at no cost and run on their own servers"
So, back to the 1990s? Not that it's a bad thing, but aren't php scripts and wordpress plugins to do this kind of thing old hat and pre-date flickr, picasa, skydrive et all?
A well-designed 2013-era take on the problem may be interesting to see, but the mere existence of software to store, present and manage photos on your website is as mundane as can be. So, what's new here?
You can get [name].openphoto.me account and link it with your dropbox. You upload photos to your openphoto account by dragging them into a window - but the files actually go to folders on your dropbox account. Hence - full control, backup ability and everything. Anybody (you, the FBI, a hacker) can delete your openphoto account tomorrow but you don't lose a single photo.
But, on the other hand anyone (you, the FBI, a hacker) can delete your dropbox account tomorrow and you'll lose all your photos. This just moves the problem.
Moves the problem in such a way that if you stop trusting Dropbox you can easily move your photos to another location without any disruption of the service.
I hope I don't come off as cynical, but there's no way this project will ever 'defeat' Picasa or Flickr. It could very well end up being a successful project, but it will never be on top. Also drop the whole 'Open' and 'Free' thing when it comes to naming. No one outside of the dev community cares about or even acknowledges the existence of FOSS. This project sounds great, it just doesn't seem tailored or marketed towards a mass userbase.
The name of the hosted version is changing in a couple weeks. There will always be multiple players in the photo space but Facebook proved me wrong with that in regards to sharing.
> If you have been living in a cave for the past few months then you would have missed the success of OpenPhoto
I don't live in a cave, and while OpenPhoto is promising, it's quite a bit premature to call it "a success", especially in the presence of competitors boasting millions of users such as Picasa and Flickr.
Let's talk again once OpenPhoto reaches a million users.
I've used it since summer now. It's mostly ok, but it sucks for actually viewing any photos as they are really really small and most of the screen estate is just navigation stuff.
I hope at some point in the future it will be useful for its intended purpose: viewing photos.
We're keenly aware of the UI issues and have been addressing them in the upcoming release which is about 4 weeks out. Hopefully it'll be much more useful once we release it.
That is most likely the reason this, as many other "open" alternatives, won't defeat proprietary solutions.
A normal human being won't bother setting up an S3 account and integrating with this service when they can just pay Flickr/Picasa and forget.