Project Reclaim: experimenting with openphoto.me
As part of my ongoing Project Reclaim, and spurred on by D’Arcy Norman’s recent post on abandoning Flickr, I’ve been playing with openphoto.me.
In a similar way to the idea behind Unhosted, you bring your own data (i.e. photos) and the application does something with it (i.e. display them nicely, allow you to share them easily). I’m using Dropbox, but you can use Amazon S3, Box.net and more.
I like openphoto.me. I’ve uploaded two sets, one public and one private. The private one is of my children and shared only with family. The public one is of some photos I took down at Druridge Bay yesterday.
Where do you store your photos? Why?
Hi Doug,
Gave http://johnjohnston.openphoto.me a shot a week or two ago. I like the Dropbox integration but it lacks Flickr features I like, difficult to set CC license for example. Not too sure I fully understand how openphoto works, photos seem to be duplicated on their servers?
I like the fact that I pay for Flickr make me feel, perhaps naively, secure. I just blogged some worries about posterous http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?e=2287 which can extend to other free services.
Thanks for the comment, John! I suppose it’s under heavy development: in what sense did you find it difficult to set the CC license?
John,
Good feedback. I’m a lead developer on OpenPhoto.
The reason the photos are duplicated are because we don’t want to store multiple low resolution versions of a given photo in your dropbox account. Even if we wanted to it would be difficult and slow to load images into a web page directly from Dropbox. We’ve been keeping an ear out to see if this is confusing or not. Most people don’t notice and are primarily concerned about the originals showing up in their Dropbox account.
I’d also be curious what you found difficult about CC licensing.
WRT the Posterous concerns I think that’s where OpenPhoto is a bit immune. If we can achieve the goal of user’s controlling where their photos and meta data are then if something happens to the hosted version of OpenPhoto it would be trivial to move to another OpenPhoto hosting provider (something Posterous/Flickr/etc can’t offer). We’re close but have a few wrinkles to iron out before all that is made available for the average user.
Doug’s correct that we’re under heavy development (but still stable!). Most of what drives our new features is what users tell us they like or hate — we kind of have to be driven by this since we’re open source.
Hi Doug, jmathai,
The CC license, I’ve not found a setting for a default license, is there one?
The default seems to be private? I can bulk edit this but would prefer to have it public by default? (I’ve been using the Drobox sync rather than web interface)
I only seem to be able to change licenses one at a time, I can bulk edit tags etc but not licenses.
Thanks for the clarification about the image hosting, makes sense, but I couldn’t find the info in a quick scan of the docs probably my bad.
I’ll keep having a play, I presume from the metadata mention in the comment that this might be written back to my dropbox if you reach your goal?