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Comment by Veratyr | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for doing Picturelife! Saw it in one of the comment threads here and have been using it since.

Love the custom S3 backing especially and the speed you guys move at (Lightroom support and Android updates came out so fast) as well as your amazing support (don't know how Amy puts up with me)!

Just recommended you to a friend in fact :)

The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple like a URL, separating storage from display etc.

Oh and it'd nice to have the option to pay you $2 or $3 since I'm using S3 :)

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  The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make 
  a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in 
  Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple 
  like a URL, separating storage from display etc.

For what it's worth, that's specifically what our differentiation was with OpenPhoto/Trovebox (we support about 7 storage services along with being open source[1]). We've moved on from the consumer space because there didn't seem to be a large enough market for that specifically; separating data storage from application logic.

You can see our Kickstarter from 3 years back[2].

I asked in another post how offering custom S3 buckets was working out for PictureLife. Curious if someone else found a market for that.

[1] https://github.com/photo/frontend

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-pho...

Thanks for the feedback. Firstly, Amy is very awesome indeed.

And as for the recommendation accept payment for the S3 service, it's something we've considered – likely a choose your own dollar amount thing. In the meantime, feel free to send any money you want to nate@picturelife.com :)

As for using other storage options – at this point we don't feel like we can provide as high quality a service using other storage systems. S3 works well because our architecture is oriented around it, and housed within the same network, allowing us to process, serve, and analyze photos efficiently. Using Dropbox, for instance, would introduce huge amounts of latency and instability in this process.

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