[disclaimer: see my profile for my involvement with Yahoo, I have no connection with this particular incident/Flickr/etc]<p>This and the TC post annoy me because Snapjoy (or perhaps the tech press) is trying to spin this into some underdog vs evil big company story when it isn't.<p>For example, when Snapjoy says "We tried our best to stay within Flickr’s API limits, but the overwhelmingly positive response has exceeded our expectations.", what they are really saying is that they didn't implement rate limiting correctly.<p>And when they say "We’re a bit surprised that the key was disabled almost immediately after we reached the limit.", what they're saying is that Flickr actually did implement said limiting correctly (don't have personal knowledge, assume that's what happened).<p>I also like the spin from the tech press on this somehow meaning that your photos are locked into Flickr when Snapjoy has neither an API or any other mechanism to get photos out - all I see is a promise of a future feature to sync to Dropbox/S3.<p>I completely understand the PR game being played here but I wish it needn't be this way. Especially since Snapjoy seems to be a very slick product from a very talented team.<p>And all this ignoring the issues with the name - I'm not sure how it is ok to use a derivative of your competitor's name to build something designed to take users away from them.
With Flickr, I get unlimited storage for $24/year. I'm probably nearing 100GB of photos there, so in order to store those same photos with Snapjoy, it would cost me $120/year. What's the extra value that I get for an additional $100/year?<p>And does Snapjoy integrate with iPhoto? I use Flickrfriend for iPhoto now to sync Flickr and iPhoto, but if I don't have a way to sync Snapjoy and iPhoto, it's a non-starter.
This is tacky on two levels:<p>1) it just attacks flickr without really giving any reason. Flickr is a sinking ship. Great. Why? Why do we have any reason to believe Snapjoy is going to outlast Flickr?<p>2) Using the image of a sinking cruise ship weeks after a cruise ship wreck killed at least 17 people. I'm not easily offended, and this didn't personally offend me, but it's pretty much the first thing I thought of when I saw a drawing of a sinking cruise ship. Why run the risk?
It would be nice if I could also rescue some pictures from facebook too. Double brownie points if your software can automatically remove duplicates in the process.
This is great -- I've been looking for a way to get my photos off Flickr before my pro account expires this May. Snapjoy sucked in 2200 photos in just a few minutes.<p>(The only glitch was when I clicked "Get Started Now" on the flickraft site, it just redirected me to snapjoy.com. I had to manually go into my settings and connect my Flickr account, which triggered the import automagically.)
On the surface I love this idea. Flickr has been stagnant for years and starting to worry me. I don't mind paying for a photo sharing service but the market sure is saturated. I'll be looking for a little more than a pretty, overpriced UI over Amazon's S3.<p>Wouldn't it be great if a company came around and offered front ends for S3. One for photo sharing, one for docs. You could switch them out like skins. Your data is in one place and never moves. If a competitor comes along with a better front-end, you could change to them.<p>That would also be nice, because then you could have one monthly fee for all of you online storage needs. Let's be honest, they're all hosted by Amazon anyway.
Snapfish, DropBox, and several of the other large photo / filing sharing sites are essentially a UI for Amazon's S3 cloud.<p>I pay for dropbox primarily to store family photos & videos.<p>In fact the stuff I need to back-up that fits outside that category would fit in a free, or lower priced dropbox plan.<p>I would switch based on price alone since photos are fairly static, non-changing, and the #1 concern is that they survive a hard disk crash.<p>I wonder when Amazon just decides to go and own this market by offering a better photo UI, or buys somebody to do it for them.<p>Amazon has already shown they have no fear of running over profitable customer segments (eg they launched Prime Video while also counting NetFlix as a huge client).
I love the infographic and the one-sentence pitch. It's funny, it's totally clear why I should use it, and I'll never forget it.<p>People here are saying that they're jumping the gun and Flickr isn't sinking yet. Maybe that's true. But great marketing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that's what this looks like to me.
We built UnifyPhotos - <a href="http://export.goyaka.com" rel="nofollow">http://export.goyaka.com</a> a month back, which moved photos from Flickr to Facebook. We moved more than 850k photos.<p>I can say that the API limiting here is an implementation issue. Instead of querying information about each photo, if you could pass meta information (date_upload,geo,date_taken,icon_server,original_format, url_sq,url_o,url_m,url_b,description) while doing photosets.getPhotos, you don't have to query for each photo.
Does Snapjoy work well with photo organization apps like Aperture?<p>I've hit the 100GB limit on Dropbox, and I'd like to be able to view albums on the web.
I guess I'm starting to get jaded... I remember when Flickr was the liferaft of Yahoo Photos and then even before that when Yahoo Photos was the liferaft of Kodak Galleries.<p>I still don't have a photo storage solution that I'm happy with - but I'm hoping that in 10 years or so Google will have indexed the three or four hard drives in my storage unit and placed them into Picasa X.
UnifyPhotos <a href="http://export.goyaka.com" rel="nofollow">http://export.goyaka.com</a> lets you move your Flickr photos to Facebook.<p>Interesting note mentioned there - "I love snapjoy's UI. But they don't allow import from flickr. Also, social circle in Snapjoy is something I have to build. Facebook fits the bill."
This is not unprecedented. We did this years ago with Zooomr. There was a tech crunch post about it: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/16/why-is-flickr-afraid-of-zoomr/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2006/06/16/why-is-flickr-afraid-of-zoo...</a><p>Many Flickr users were not happy when they discovered that the ability to migrate their accounts was considered "burn[ing] bandwidth and CPU cycles."<p>My co-founder, Kris, was quoted with the following:<p>> Tate from Zooomr says that the exports are a cost of doing business, that Web 2.0 is where “the roach motel stops” and that Zooomr will always make it easy for their customers to take their data elsewhere<p>Props to Snapjoy for creating an awesome product and giving people freedom. I hope that you guys get your license key back!
Annnnnd Flickr just blocked their API key.
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/garrytan/status/167030905821605888" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/garrytan/status/167030905821605888</a>
Sorry. I'm not leaving Flickr. It's one of my favorite spots on the Internet. I love the community aspect of the site and the countless quality (and not so quality) Creative Commons contributions.<p>I have spent more hours than I'd care to admit sifting through photos, admiring people's work, reading comments - all the while listening to trip hop or whatever is on SOMAFM.<p>It's one of the best parts of website design: finding the perfect image. I'm not going anywhere.