5 ms·

"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

"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.
    - fakeer 14y ago
      >>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.
      - pretoriusB 14y ago
        No, but for them there are tons of exporter apps for Flickr they can run from THEIR computer.
        jmathai 14y ago
        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".
  - buza 14y ago
    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.
    - FireBeyond 14y ago
      Even as someone who can shoot 1,000 shots in a day for a wedding easily... mind sharing, what/how you have over half a million shots of?
      - buza 14y ago
        Most of them are screenshots uploaded via a script for an academic project.
bad_user 14y ago
You don't need an S3 account, as it can work with Dropbox and they are working on Google Drive integration.
- jmathai 14y ago
  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.
pjmlp 14y ago
> "You decide where to store photos" This is the main reason why I decided to remove the photos I share with friends out of such services and create a minimal gallery in my own web site.

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.
  - fakeer 14y ago
    >>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.
    - pretoriusB 14y ago
      No, but for them there are tons of exporter apps for Flickr they can run from THEIR computer.
      - jmathai 14y ago
        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".
- buza 14y ago
  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.
  - FireBeyond 14y ago
    Even as someone who can shoot 1,000 shots in a day for a wedding easily... mind sharing, what/how you have over half a million shots of?
    - buza 14y ago
      Most of them are screenshots uploaded via a script for an academic project.

bad_user 14y ago

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

jmathai 14y ago
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.

pjmlp 14y ago

> "You decide where to store photos" This is the main reason why I decided to remove the photos I share with friends out of such services and create a minimal gallery in my own web site.