[bdesham]

> With OpenPhoto, Mathai is transparently attempting to put the user back in control of where their photos are stored, so the service will allow users to freely select which cloud storage and database services meet their needs […] for example, OpenPhoto users can select Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloudfiles, Dropbox or any other service with a file storage API to store their photos.

I’m having a hard time seeing the practical utility of this. Professional or dedicated photographers have their stuff carefully backed up already. Ordinary users haven’t ever heard of S3 or Cloud Files. There might be a couple of geeks left who would be interested in the different hosting options, but surely these wouldn’t comprise enough of the user base to make that much complexity worth it.

I agree that Flickr has been unfortunately stagnant, but—at least from this article—this guy seems like he’s too focused on the implementation details and not enough on the high-level features that will actually draw people to the platform.

[dpark]

I agree. "Choose your own storage system" is not a feature for at least 99% of the people who use a photo-sharing service. To the typical user, choosing your storage system means choosing Flickr, or Picasa, or SmugMug, or OpenPhoto, or whatever else. It doesn't mean choosing OpenPhoto+S3 vs OpenPhoto+Dropbox. That's not a real choice. You're still tied to OpenPhoto, even if your files are stored on S3.

Your files (and especially your metadata) aren't going to magically migrate from OpenPhoto+S3 to Picasa unless he's also planning on writing a tool for that, in which case I'd suggest that investing in his startup is an even worse idea than it seems at first, because he's spending time on features that only benefit non-customers.

Thus guy seems caught up in architecture astronomy, which is frankly not something that I see too many people paying money for.