8 ms·

Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

42 points by rohshall 14y ago

snogglethorpe 14y ago
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 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. So... good luck, I guess, but, well ... meh.
- jmathai 14y ago
  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.
- lnanek2 14y ago
  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.
nextstep 14y ago
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?
- jmathai 14y ago
  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.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    >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.
    - jmathai 14y ago
      > 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.
adamnemecek 14y ago
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.
- jmathai 14y ago
  We'll see. That's what we are doing with https://openphoto.me https://openphoto.me
  - devmanguru1 14y ago
    Thats cool I would pay to use openphoto if you hosted for me and be satisfied knowing it supports a open source project.
  - fakeer 14y ago
    You've a video on this page that doesn't work without Flash or H.264. Both are proprietary.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  This comment tugs at me. "end users won't run their own servers" The reason it tugs at me is because I can't tell if it is because they don't want to, or that they can't.
  - riffic 14y ago
    End users probably won't, but it would be a good place for organizations to investigate. You know, the ones with IT staff and technology budgets.
  - adamnemecek 14y ago
    I mean can you imagine say a high schooler having to maintain a server running their facebook profile?
    - deleted 14y ago
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
"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.
- jmathai 14y ago
  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. This is a marathon.
- greggman 14y ago
  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.
  - bad_user 14y ago
    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.
    - ceejayoz 14y ago
      > 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.
jmathai 14y ago
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.
- troymc 14y ago
  What's the cost of the hosted pro version?
  - jmathai 14y ago
    Currently $29.99/year but discounted to $19.99. We'll have more plans in the future.
    - bhadra 14y ago
      Does it mean that if I go pro now, I pay USD 19.99 only during the first year and then USD 29.99 from second year onwards?
      - jmathai 14y ago
        Good question. $19.99 forever. We'll make sure that is clear.
        14y ago
1gor 14y ago
If you have been living in a cave for the past few months... I want to stop reading right here.
- devmanguru1 14y ago
  Sounds like a euphemism
- ghshephard 14y ago
  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.
codenerdz 14y ago
Just when I wanted to learn more about the project, it appears to be down :( http://theopenphotoproject.org/ http://theopenphotoproject.org/
- devmanguru1 14y ago
  Yep seems to be down
- ghshephard 14y ago
  I tried to go add an account via the iOS app - was told, "Couldn't Execute Requests". I guess on the flip side, it makes me feel better about PhotoStream uptime. :-)
- jmathai 14y ago
  Sorry about that. It's back up.
brianchu 14y ago
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.
- jmathai 14y ago
  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.
dokem 14y ago
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.
- jmathai 14y ago
  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. Here's a graphic that depicts just how dominant Facebook is. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42150/facebook-digital-photo-dominance-infographic http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42150/facebook-digital-photo...
esalman 14y ago
Why every project whose name starts with "Open-" is to be considered a future success?
DigitalSea 14y ago
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.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  You mean, $25/year, correct?
- kawera 14y ago
  Flickr Pro costs $25 per year not per month.
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  My bad, I've got a tight deadline due and probably shouldn't even be on HN. Yes I meant $25 per year. Even S3 could compete with $25 per month, ha.
SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
>"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?
- Gravityloss 14y ago
  No. Openphoto works like this (among other ways): 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.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
    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.
    - jmathai 14y ago
      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.
magnet_ball 14y ago
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.
- jmathai 14y ago
  Because that's the perspective of the author. For those not interested in installing themselves we offer a hosted solution at https://openphoto.me https://openphoto.me
aufreak3 14y ago
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?
Gravityloss 14y ago
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. Seems to be down at the moment as well...
- jmathai 14y ago
  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.
  - Gravityloss 14y ago
    Thanks jmathai, that's awesome!
bhadra 14y ago
Can the android and the iPhone app be used for sharing photos through email or with with Facebook, Twitter and Google+?
- jmathai 14y ago
  Email, Facebook and Twitter. Not yet Google Plus.
  - bhadra 14y ago
    Do you have any short-term plans for Google Plus?
    - jmathai 14y ago
      Not at the moment. But it's something that's easy enough that it'll just make it into a release before we officially plan it.
laureny 14y ago
> 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.
- jmathai 14y ago
  It's a bit boring to make this statement once it has a few million users :). I agree with you on it being premature though :). And it's not exactly the goal of the project. Disclaimer: I started OpenPhoto.
laureny 14y ago
> 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.
- jmathai 14y ago
  > What lack of openness exactly? 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.
darklajid 14y ago
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. 1: http://theopenphotoproject.org/documentation/guide/InstallationUbuntuApache http://theopenphotoproject.org/documentation/guide/Installat...

42 points by rohshall 14y ago

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 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. So... good luck, I guess, but, well ... meh.

jmathai 14y ago
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.
lnanek2 14y ago
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.

nextstep 14y ago

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?

jmathai 14y ago
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.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >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.
  - jmathai 14y ago
    > 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.

adamnemecek 14y ago

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.

jmathai 14y ago
We'll see. That's what we are doing with https://openphoto.me https://openphoto.me
- devmanguru1 14y ago
  Thats cool I would pay to use openphoto if you hosted for me and be satisfied knowing it supports a open source project.
- fakeer 14y ago
  You've a video on this page that doesn't work without Flash or H.264. Both are proprietary.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
This comment tugs at me. "end users won't run their own servers" The reason it tugs at me is because I can't tell if it is because they don't want to, or that they can't.
- riffic 14y ago
  End users probably won't, but it would be a good place for organizations to investigate. You know, the ones with IT staff and technology budgets.
- adamnemecek 14y ago
  I mean can you imagine say a high schooler having to maintain a server running their facebook profile?
  - deleted 14y ago

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

"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.

jmathai 14y ago
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. This is a marathon.
greggman 14y ago
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.
- bad_user 14y ago
  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.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    > 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.

jmathai 14y ago

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.

troymc 14y ago
What's the cost of the hosted pro version?
- jmathai 14y ago
  Currently $29.99/year but discounted to $19.99. We'll have more plans in the future.
  - bhadra 14y ago
    Does it mean that if I go pro now, I pay USD 19.99 only during the first year and then USD 29.99 from second year onwards?
    - jmathai 14y ago
      Good question. $19.99 forever. We'll make sure that is clear.
      - 14y ago

1gor 14y ago

If you have been living in a cave for the past few months... I want to stop reading right here.

devmanguru1 14y ago
Sounds like a euphemism
ghshephard 14y ago
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.

codenerdz 14y ago

Just when I wanted to learn more about the project, it appears to be down :( http://theopenphotoproject.org/ http://theopenphotoproject.org/

devmanguru1 14y ago
Yep seems to be down
ghshephard 14y ago
I tried to go add an account via the iOS app - was told, "Couldn't Execute Requests". I guess on the flip side, it makes me feel better about PhotoStream uptime. :-)
jmathai 14y ago
Sorry about that. It's back up.

brianchu 14y ago

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.

jmathai 14y ago
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.

dokem 14y ago

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.

jmathai 14y ago
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. Here's a graphic that depicts just how dominant Facebook is. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42150/facebook-digital-photo-dominance-infographic http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42150/facebook-digital-photo...

esalman 14y ago

Why every project whose name starts with "Open-" is to be considered a future success?

DigitalSea 14y ago

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.

ghshephard 14y ago
You mean, $25/year, correct?
kawera 14y ago
Flickr Pro costs $25 per year not per month.
DigitalSea 14y ago
My bad, I've got a tight deadline due and probably shouldn't even be on HN. Yes I meant $25 per year. Even S3 could compete with $25 per month, ha.

SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago

>"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?

Gravityloss 14y ago
No. Openphoto works like this (among other ways): 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.
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
  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.
  - jmathai 14y ago
    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.

magnet_ball 14y ago

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.

jmathai 14y ago
Because that's the perspective of the author. For those not interested in installing themselves we offer a hosted solution at https://openphoto.me https://openphoto.me

aufreak3 14y ago

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?

Gravityloss 14y ago

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. Seems to be down at the moment as well...

jmathai 14y ago
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.
- Gravityloss 14y ago
  Thanks jmathai, that's awesome!

bhadra 14y ago

Can the android and the iPhone app be used for sharing photos through email or with with Facebook, Twitter and Google+?

jmathai 14y ago
Email, Facebook and Twitter. Not yet Google Plus.
- bhadra 14y ago
  Do you have any short-term plans for Google Plus?
  - jmathai 14y ago
    Not at the moment. But it's something that's easy enough that it'll just make it into a release before we officially plan it.

laureny 14y ago

> 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.

jmathai 14y ago
It's a bit boring to make this statement once it has a few million users :). I agree with you on it being premature though :). And it's not exactly the goal of the project. Disclaimer: I started OpenPhoto.

laureny 14y ago

> 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.

jmathai 14y ago
> What lack of openness exactly? 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.

darklajid 14y ago

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