Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr
benjaminkerensa.com
benjaminkerensa.com
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.
This is a marathon.
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.
That was point oc put forward: A normal human being won't bother setting up an S3 account.
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".
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.
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.
We are at step 2....of a lot of steps.
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.
There is no update on the web site (https://openphoto.me/signup) yet.
* https://www.drupalgardens.com/pricing * https://purchase.websynthesis.com/plans.aspx?oid=
but of course you should do testing to learn what works best for you.
Also, it took like 6 hours before it pulled any photos from Facebook.
No offense, but all in all, this was a really frustrating and unhappy user experience for me.
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?
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.
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.
If you have been living in a cave for the past few months...
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.
I guess on the flip side, it makes me feel better about PhotoStream uptime. :-)
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I started this thing.
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?
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.
For those not interested in installing themselves we offer a hosted solution at https://openphoto.me
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?
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.
Here's a graphic that depicts just how dominant Facebook is. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42150/facebook-digital-photo...
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 agree with you on it being premature though :). And it's not exactly the goal of the project.
Disclaimer: I started OpenPhoto.
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...