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Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

benjaminkerensa.com

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Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#11

Post by jmathai »

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".

Happy to answer questions.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#12

Post by bad_user »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #6

"You decide where to store photos" 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.

You don't need an S3 account, as it can work with Dropbox and they are working on Google Drive integration.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#13

Post by jmathai »

bad_user wrote: post #12
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #6

"You decide where to store photos" 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.

You don't need an S3 account, as it can work with Dropbox and they are working on Google Drive integration.

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.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#14

Post by jmathai »

snogglethorpe wrote: post #2

Hmmm, never heard of it. 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…

Nothing guarantees success. Having a radically different approach to an existing problem and getting people on board who understand it is a first step.

We are at step 2....of a lot of steps.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#15

Post by ceejayoz »

bad_user wrote: post #10
greggman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may say unlimited, but only a fool would believe it. How many photos do you have uploaded anyway? Also, good luck dowloading your whole photo collection from Flickr.

> 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.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#16

Post by buza »

bad_user wrote: post #10
greggman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may say unlimited, but only a fool would believe it. How many photos do you have uploaded anyway? Also, good luck dowloading your whole photo collection from Flickr.

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.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#17

Post by devmanguru1 »

jmathai wrote: post #5
adamnemecek wrote: post #4

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.

We'll see. That's what we are doing with https://openphoto.me

Thats cool I would pay to use openphoto if you hosted for me and be satisfied knowing it supports a open source project.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#18

Post by fakeer »

ceejayoz wrote: post #15
bad_user wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may say unlimited, but only a fool would believe it. How many photos do you have uploaded anyway? Also, good luck dowloading your whole photo collection from Flickr.

> 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 pa…

>>I periodically fire up an EC2 instance

That was point oc put forward: A normal human being won't bother setting up an S3 account.

Re: Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

#19

Post by fakeer »

jmathai wrote: post #5
adamnemecek wrote: post #4

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.

We'll see. That's what we are doing with https://openphoto.me

You've a video on this page that doesn't work without Flash or H.264. Both are proprietary.
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