Disclaimer: lead developer of Trovebox / OpenPhoto<p>I wish more folks would make this distinction. Going one step farther I set out to create a layer on top of Dropbox that was optimized for photos (and videos).<p>Essentially, give a proper photo API to the files in your Dropbox. Things like date searches, plotting photos on a map, etc.<p>Then another step beyond that. Migrate between any storage service without losing a single feature, keeping every URL in tact and a mobile app which continues to work as if nothing happened. Dropbox is great but it isn't future proof either.<p>Then the last (and probably most important) open source it all.<p><a href="https://github.com/photo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/photo</a>
This is a great article. After holding off on switching to automatic Dropbox iPhone camera uploads for months, finally I switched it on as a test and immediately wondered why I had waited.<p>Very impressed with the OpenPhoto initiative too.<p>After struggling with the increasingly slower speed of iPhoto (similar to the article author), pretty wrappers on top of file systems/Dropbox look like the foreseeable future of photo library management.
"When I click “photos” I can see ALL the photos that I’ve stored in dropbox -all, as in ALL, no matter where they are stored, and there’s also a time line on the right, making it easy to jump to specific dates!"<p>I wonder if this is something new that Dropbox is rolling out in stages. I still only see Photos added via Camera Upload.<p>And yes, I'm a paying Dropbox customer, so that's not the distinction.
I like Adobe Lightroom because it's transparent at the filesystem level. It keeps a separate catalog, but you can point it at any directory for photos.