Why recommend a Flickr replacement that has all of the same potential pitfalls of Flickr? In this context (HN) in particular, OpenPhoto seems like the best alternative: http://theopenphotoproject.org/
The problem is hosting your photos with OpenPhotoProject would cost more.
With a Flickr Pro account, for $2 per month you can upload an unlimited number of photos. Well, I'm sure there are limits, but I uploaded 8,000 full resolution pictures on it in only a couple of days and it didn't complain. Also my collection is growing like crazy ever since I became a father.
So the whole collection is like 32 GB. On Amazon S3 that would cost me $4.48 per month just for the storage. Managing it, like uploading new ones or deleting from it would also bring additional costs. I'm also starting to make movies, so I'm sure my collection will double in size pretty soon. So that would be $8.96 per month. And it won't stop there.
The only cheap alternative to Flickr would be Google's Picassa. You can purchase 80 GB of storage for $20 per year, or $1.6 per month. Also 1 TB of pictures would cost on Google $256 per year, while on S3 it would be $1720 per year.
Personally I'm not interested in showing off my work to the world. I'm only interested in storing those pictures somewhere in case I need a backup or in case I want to access them from a remote location. Flickr is great for both, too bad that Yahoo is killing it.
Disclaimer: lead developer on OpenPhoto providing some clarification.
That's sort of the point though. $2/month is cheap but the actual cost is the 4 years you probably spent uploading and tagging photos only to have the service die.
Your options are continue using a service you don't like for a great price or start using something else and leave behind the 4 years of organization (which you need with 8,000 photos).
It's kinda like the free hit crack dealers give out. In the end it's not worth it. Trust me, I've been there in a previous life.
That being said, Amazon S3 isn't required. You can install it yourself and point it to your NAS.
And btw, I've been thinking about building something like OpenPhoto myself because I also don't like the lockin and I'm really glad that you've seen this need and did something about it.
So I've spent like ten minutes clicking around the OpenPhoto site, and it seems to me that they somehow forgot to mention what it is that OpenPhoto actually does.
Like, I don't need special software to store photos on S3. I don't need special software to hand links to files on S3 out to others, or display the files on my own site in galleries I build myself.
Presumably, then OpenPhoto lets me collect said photos into galleries and hosts the gallery bits? If so, why doesn't the word gallery appear anywhere on their site? Why isn't there any way to explore the galleries that they are hosting right now? Do I have to create an account to even see them? Would people I want to share with need to? Why aren't there some screenshots of what these galleries look like? Does the absence of all of this information mean that it doesn't actually handle the gallery bits? If that's the case, what does it do?
Their website is like a case-study in what not to do. It looks great, but at no point does it clearly communicate to me what it is their product does.
My understanding is that the OpenPhoto Project is the open source project, and that site is aimed at developers. OpenPhoto.me is at least partly aimed at users. It explains it a little better.
Oh that makes a lot more sense. I assumed that the original link was the user site, and wondered why there was so little content aimed at explaining the end-user experience, interesting as the dev details were.
It's actually our second attempt at making it easy to understand WTH we're building. I guess we need to take it back to the drawing board. Out of curiosity, did you ever (even think to) click on the "Get Started" links? Our goal was that end users would click that and then click the giant red button we put on that page. Not sure it's working though :).
Basically, imagine if you could use something as awesome as Flickr but have the photos stored in your personal Dropbox account or S3 bucket.
> Basically, imagine if you could use something as awesome as Flickr but have the photos stored in your personal Dropbox account or S3 bucket.
Intellectually I had a fairly good idea that that was what was on offer, from reading through the high-level info and the REST API, but there's really nothing that spells that out in a concrete way for non-developer end-users. It's great that I can host photos on my own storage and that the code is on github and that the API is well-documented and hey it got started on Kickstarter!
But where's the beef? What do I get in a tangible way for signing up? Which leads us into...
> Out of curiosity, did you ever (even think to) click on the "Get Started" links? Our goal was that end users would click that and then click the giant red button we put on that page. Not sure it's working though :).
Yeah, I got there pretty quickly, but I didn't want to sign up until I knew what I was signing up for in a concrete sense. Freedom, Peace-of-Mind if OpenPhoto goes away, etc, are all good and noble things, but I don't want to create an account until I can see tangibles: what do the galleries look like, and how do they feel to browse around in? What kinds of customizations are available? That's the sort of information I'd expect to find in your Overview page[1], but there's almost nothing concrete to be found there. http://openphoto.me/ [2] is slightly better, once I was pointed to it, but only insofar as there are two tiny thumbnails which appear to show something of the user experience.
Flickr and 500px have sold me over the years because I could hit 'Explore' or 'Popular Photos' straight from their landing page and experience exactly what signing up would get me in terms of what the site feels like to use, what the community is like and how it functions, etc. One of my big concerns as a user of one of these sites boils down to: if I take photos of someone, and use this site to display the photos, and send links to that person, what will that person's experience be, and is that an experience I want to associate myself with?
Neither http://theopenphotoproject.org/ nor http://openphoto.me/ offer me a way to really answer that question for myself, so neither site makes me want to sign up, however nice hosting on my own back-end might sound.
[1] Incidentally, "3) RELAX, ORGANIZE AND SHARE YOUR PHOTOS (REQUIRED)" comes off to me as a lot more ominous than its probably intended. It sounds like it requires me to share all of my photos with the internet, privacy be damned. Maybe needs a rethink of the verbiage?
[2] The combo sign-up/request an invite form seems pretty confusing. After finally deciding from squinting at the thumbnails that I might want to at least click around inside, I started to fill it out before realizing I didn't have an invite, apparently required, and abandoned any thought of going further out of discouragement. Just my opinion, but I'd probably just have a request-an-invite form, and send invitees to a different private link via email. Realizing something is closed to me 3/4ths of the way through a form can be off-putting.
All suggestions in this post come from an engineer, not a UX expert. YMMV. Check local listings for details. You have been warned.
+1. OpenPhoto offers the freedom of storing my photos in the storage I own and it is something I really care about. Besides, it is an open source project. I can even run my own server if I wanted to!
