Tell HN: You said not to. So I quit my job and started. 5 mos later: OpenPhoto
Almost a year ago I asked if you would pay for a photo management and sharing service that allowed you to store your photos into your own Amazon S3 bucket. The overall response seemed to be NO.
A few months later in May I decided to leave my job at Yahoo! and pursue it full time anyway. Shortly after I launched it as a Kickstarter project[1] it ended up getting coverage on Techcrunch[2], RWW[3], and TNW[4]. I reached the goal of $25k on the last day of fundraising on Kickstarter.
In August we were the first project to be accepted into Mozilla's WebFWD program[5]. I say we because by this point there was a community helping build OpenPhoto. Did I mention it's 100% free and open source? That's pretty important.
What was originally pitched as a "Wordpress-like" photo service is now a full fledged photo management and photo sharing platform. The OpenPhoto API powers not only the web client but an Android and iOS client as well (not yet in the app store). I had originally thought it would take me 2 months to build but it's taken me and a team of volunteers 5 months.
What we've built is orders of magnitude beyond what I had originally envisioned and I think OpenPhoto stands a chance to actually disrupt the photo space by giving control and ownership of people's photos back to them.
To find out more about OpenPhoto go to http://theopenphotoproject.org
Here are a few invites:
* http://openphoto.me/?code=zd065
* http://openphoto.me/?code=zd635
* http://openphoto.me/?code=zd92d
* http://openphoto.me/?code=zdb3f
* http://openphoto.me/?code=zdd72
* http://openphoto.me/?code=zdde9
* http://openphoto.me/?code=zdfbd
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/former-yahoo-engineer-quits-to-build-a-flickr-killer-on-kickstarter/
[3] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/save_your_photos_to_amazon_or_dropbox_with_app_pla.php
[4] http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/07/16/creating-a-portable-web-when-your-data-is-truly-yours/
[5] http://blog.webfwd.org/post/9300091721/webfwd-welcomes-the-first-fellows
143 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 98.0 ms ] threadThat's one of the hardest parts is to narrow use cases down.
What we're focusing on at the moment is for consumers. It provides a way to synchronize/aggregate your photos from across multiple photo services into one location (that you have the option to own/control). We haven't built all of the connectors but that's in the pipeline.
From a technical perspective, decoupling the service from the database and filesystem (basically allowing users to provide their own) opens up a lot of opportunities. We're paying a lot of attention to which opportunities look the most interesting.
There's an entirely separate use case for businesses which we haven't even touched. Any business that was weary of putting their photos on Flickr now has a compelling alternative that will satisfy any of their paranoia.
You should use this if you care about having a central repository of all your photos, owning and controlling them and want some level of choice. If you don't care about those things then there's always Facebook :)*.
By no means is OpenPhoto meant to replace Facebook, it compliments it quite well.
Like:
I've got a ton of respect for the Diaspora folks but we're focusing much more on the average user and making the software appealing to them (which means easy to use). Diaspora also has to overcome the chicken & egg problem which we can work around fairly easily by providing value even when your friends aren't on OpenPhoto.
Also, on the see the difference page it might help to compare yourself to Flickr and other photo services.
I don't mean any disrespect or offense, I just don't think your website is immediately clear.
I expect most non-technical users to go to the hosted version which won't have nearly as much information but a straightforward way to get started. The project site is geared more for early adopters who care about said liberation, developers and theme makers.
The hosted version (currently designed by myself who has no creative juice) is at http://openphoto.me
The main thing that hit me about your current landing page is it's lack of vibrancy!
The photo apps/sites that do well (500px, Instagram) thrust beautiful images at you at every opportunity and it works!
While you aren't responsible for the quality of art stored in your accounts you are still trying to appeal to those that are attracted by great images and proving that others entrust their greatest works into this service.
Having some great photographers use your service that you could showcase,would speak volumes to other potential customers.
But I agree that better copy is needed.
There is something out there that could help you sharpen the copy on your site: http://www.copyhackers.com
Think about having an open source Flickr (self installed or hosted) that connects to your Dropbox or personal S3 bucket.
http://www.diigo.com/item/image/15sdb/njh2
https://github.com/openphoto/community/issues/17
I'm sure other people are curious too.
It's going great though. I've had numerous side projects and co-founded a startup for a few years earlier (no successful outcome). This has received much more traction and interest so I'm riding that out and trying to build it into something I can do for a long time.
http://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/just15min/id471609083?mt=8
http://alexkessinger.net/2010/06/13/two-kids-in-two-years-be...
All of which we release as early alphas as soon as they're functional.
Not sure if that answers your question though. We're not super structured with the feedback we've gotten so far --- we just track bugs and issues and prioritize them.
Not so much to attrace WP-devs but I do think WP owes its success in part to PHP.
I don't understand the concept of openness and liberation as it applies to photos. To me, those are political concepts, not technological ones. Maybe I'm not in your target market, but to me it makes much more sense to tie "sync" and "share" to your copy more so than "open" and "liberation".
For example, if the name of your service was PhotoSync, and then if I went to the front page and saw a comparison between your service, Facebook, Flickr, and ICloud, I'd be very curious to see what you could offer over the options available to me.
Best to ride the coattails of those companies that have invested orders of magnitude more money to educate the market than to educate them yourselves.
I'm more picky about a photo gallery's look-and-feel off the bat before I think about proposing/coding changes to it.
You should put a big illustration on the front page that shows 1.) how the personal cloud powers the photo sharing and 2.) how this differs from the walled gardens of Facebook and other sites.
Also, on overview page. There is just shit loads of text. You might want to break it into a list or a series of headlines that will help me understand better.
I know you are passionate about it and won't mind writing a book on it. But overview means... well... an overview.
Seriously though, all this great feedback will be implemented :).
If you don't mind a bit of hopefully helpful criticism, perhaps change the three-item rotator at the top of http://theopenphotoproject.org/ to the following:
- A gorgeous web album to show off your photos (getting across that a Flickr-like interface to view photos comes with the product)
- Free mobile app for iOS and Android (getting across that a mobile app interface to view photos comes with the product)
- Take back your photos (change the long description here to state more clearly that you have full file-level access to your photos, hosted on a server you "own")
- Free, open and easy to use (perfect as it is)
- Flexible API & apps (perfect as it is)
That initial point-form section should get across everything you need to know, and I don't think it currently does. Lastly, I'd love an invite if you wouldn't mind sending one to sully AT yllus DOT com.
Can you send an email to hello@openphoto.me? Swamped with invites and that way you won't fall through the cracks.
It's a shame that you couldn't get empowered at Yahoo to turn Flickr into this. Maybe they'll buy you back (as talent) and give you the big chair to run things? ;)
edit: honest question cause I can't use the service.
There are plugins, webhooks, etc. At the risk of sounding arrogant it's pretty awesome what the community has built.
http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/6277876911/the-personal-cloud
I can't seem to find anything about access control, though, (who can see which photos). Is anything like this in the works?
Anyway, this looks awesome, and I'm excited to get started when I get home from work tonight!
I would want to transfer my stuff out of flickr right away if there was a non-painful way to determine how much I'd be paying to amazon for s3 storage of my photos. I have thousands of photos, but haven't actually counted them. Is there an easy way from within flickr to compute the total storage I'd need?
Flickr-pro has been a very good deal at $25/year (for virtually unlimited storage with some annoying terms/conditions). What will OpenPhoto be priced at?
If you use your own personal storage (i.e. S3 bucket) then the cost is between you and the provider (Amazon).
I've got about 25GB of photos (≈4k in number) and it runs me just under $3/month on S3.
Also when Flickr will close (merge, bankruptcy, etc.) what will happen?
Sure there is that step to move away from Flickr but once you escape you can do whatever you want. You can host it yourself, you can host it on openphoto, with enventually your own domain (move away, keep the URL), something you can't do with Flickr (but can with some other services).
Etc.
A few screenshots of a real gallery would have been nice, or a feature list. Its really technical as of now. The oneline installer looks really cool, but a bit scary, the script looked safe though, so I might try that.
Great work, will try it out in the near future. :)
Feedback: - The checkboxes for DropBox vs S3 should be radio buttons. - The hover text for Dropbox vs S3 should also work on the selection control (not just the text). It was not obvious how to find it. A little (info) icon on the end would be even better.
Add some more invite codes, and I'll get in there and send more feedback. :-)
Since neither of the checkboxes are not required and they are mutually exclusive (they're not really just a restriction on the hosted version for simplicity) -- we went with checkboxes and javascript :).
These are honest, sincere questions and not intentionally poopoo-ing on your well-earned success.
I hope we get to some sort of concensus but it's really a lot of work :). We're strapped for resources as it is. I'd like to work together where it makes sense (acquiring and sharing users) and then figure out how the pieces fit together. I think that's entirely possible.
For many things we will all be using shared technologies such as oStatus for federation.
Can you please send me an invite code? sam [at] sstave.com
Seriously - I MUST have this. I have wanted this for years.
Please email me an invite.
Drop an email to hello@openphoto.me so you don't fall through the cracks.