Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

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.

Disclaimer: I started this thing.

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.

Tell him to tone it down.

There is no update on the web site (https://openphoto.me/signup) yet.

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.

1: http://theopenphotoproject.org/documentation/guide/Installat...