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Comment by zoul | Hacker News Reader

What’s superbly dumb is that we can’t use the storage and the clients interchangeably. The storage is almost always tied to the clients. I so wish I could just start the photo app of my choice and simply pointed it to my single paid cloud storage with a standardized API, be it from Google, Apple, Amazon or DropBox.

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There's no commercial market for what you're describing [4]. I spent 3 years building it [1]. It's all open source[2] and was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation[3].

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

[2] https://github.com/photo

[3] https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai...

[4] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

edit: added link #4

There are S3 and Swift (OpenStack storage) which can be used through standardized APIs. Storage in both standards is offered by many independent providers.

It's the way to boost money-losing vendor-specific "client" solutions.

Expect other cloud providers to follow suit:

"Use our unlimited (and slow) storage if you'll sign up to use our crappy (device|app|service)".

Don't expect:

"Use our unlimited storage for (free|low fee) from anywhere".

I was considering going after this as well, as none of the cloud storage providers would build an intuitive app to offer multiple backends that let you move away from their own.

A small budget for a v1 desktop & mobile app that gracefully removed all this fuzziness could disrupt this 'store your photos here!' war between giants, using their own cloud file storage products. However that's when the transfer rates become switching costs...

But I do believe photo storage is worth a premium over file storage specifically: Photos are of family; Family is cherished; some people would run into burning buildings to save family photo albums...

is now the time?

Don't :). [1][2][3]

[1] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

[2] https://github.com/photo

[3] https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai...

Awesome! Congratulations! Thank you for sharing your journey. How has it worked out going for business customers?

Let me know if/when you want to go back to consumers. A lot has changed in 4 years and I think you hit the nail on the head with some of your previous comments. In the current environment, many people are comparing the next hard drive purchase vs cloud storage purchase. I don't believe that was the case 1 year ago.

That was before the iOS 'Your cloud storage is full' alert started scaring mothers and grandmothers everywhere in thinking their photos will be gone forever!.

That was before the (..possible) facebook decline (but my photos are there!!)

you've got a headstart on me, but features I want:

Let me be an Admin and control which cloud provider i'm going to pay for. I'll set up the vendor accounts as needed/recommended by your newsletter.

Let my Wife, Mother, Father, Mother-in-law do the uploading and sharing - seamlessly as they would with their other apps as I change hosting providers behind the scenes for them as I feel the need. the most basic of UI needed for them. - think an app they could launch to see 'All Backed-up' or 'Backing up now'

I wouldn't prioritize cropping, tagging, 'liking', emailing, sharing, communicating, friending, etc

Best of luck!

i loved the idea, but stopped using it around the time of the name change - for some reason the login stopped working for me in Opera, and that was enough friction for me to give up on it

Sorry you had troubles logging in. But thanks for using it.

To your point, the idea is/was great but if it wasn't good enough that you stopped using it because of a login issue that emphasizes my point.

I agree it's a great idea and other have had it before me and obviously still continue today. I don't believe it's something you can scale a large business from.

It's not a standardized API but you can use Lightroom plug-ins such as jfriedl's to "publish" to a variety of different sites. That said, this approach is more oriented toward uploading a curated and edited subset than your photos in bulk.

On that topic, I suppose that I'm going to have to think about how much curation I should do for the multimedia that I keep at all. I'm backing up about 1.5TB to cloud storage and that's at or over the limit of what I really have the network bandwidth to reasonably deal with. And I know that most of what's backed up could be easily deleted--but it would take time to do that curation.

ExpanDrive works across many cloud providers and mounts them as a volume (which makes it compatible with nearly any Windows or Mac app):

http://www.expandrive.com/

There are several JavaScript projects that aim to let you connect your own storage from a varity of locations. They are still pretty early on in development, though.

1. http://remotestorage.io/

2. http://cloud-rail.com/

3. https://github.com/diafygi/byoFS

Disclosure: I maintain byoFS.

Well it's called Remote Storage [1] but I guess we can't expect companies like Google, Apple, Amazon or DropBox to actually embrace that, isnt it?

[1] http://remotestorage.io/

ARQ on OS X backs up your data to AWS S3|Glacier or Google: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

I'm not affiliated with the developer, just a big fan.

Picturelife lets you specify your own S3 backing and lets you use their interface.

And I'm feeling really bad for picturelife right now.

I have one issue with Picturelife: it doesn't adhere to folder structure. A more minor one would be folder monitoring on iOS, but I can set something up with IFTTT to work around that.

Aside from that the service is wonderful and I'm really coming around to it. I want them to succeed and I hope they do.

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