When I considered starting my own company in the photo sharing/storage I did some research of the field. Ignoring the my business related conclusions, there is one thing I learned as a consumer:<p>-- You shouldn't trust your photos with these companies --<p>People store photos to last for long long time while most of these companies' lifespan is much shorter. The best outcome would be spending time, money and nerves on porting data from place to place.<p>I hate saying this but I'd go with established companies that either have a sustainable business model around photos/storage (Amazon, Dropbox, Apple) or have deep enough pockets to make up for it (Microsoft, Google). I probably forgot some but you get the idea.
At this point, no photo storing company is reliable. It might actually be a competitive advantage to form some sort of photo sharing company that has legally committed to not letting a big guy buy them and shut down their service like this. Of course, then you have the other side where they often die due to lack of hosting funds. So you'd have to charge a lot and legally require it be put into a fund that only pays for hosting or something. Tough business problem, but wanting hosting is common and not wanting Google to come blow the service away is becoming common too...
Photo sharing is awesome and all, but what about photo organization and backup? I'd like a service/program that takes my "gold" copy of my photos with metadata off my external drive and keeps my albums on Picasa/+ and Flickr in sync.<p>Is there such a service/program that does this?
>Like other many other apps, Odysee was built around a freemium model: free for the first year, and then $5/year thereafter. The founders had at one point estimated that they could keep the business sustainable if they reached 3 million users.<p>How hard would it be to get 3 million people to sign up for something at $5 a year? I imagine that at that point you might as well charge $5 a month or something, since the fixed cost of getting a person to pull out their credit card is so high
At this point it's just a matter of time before exposure.co gets acquired. I thought photo sharing and the like services were out of fashion but they are still being bought up in bushes. There's really a monopoly battle going on for the final answer to the question "Where will I store my photos, online?".
I'm happy for the team but somewhat sad for the users. I wonder why they sold so quick? Google is the antithesis of using edge devices to their maximal advantage, and this was clearly not a product acquisition.
It is very annoying when a startup gets bought like this and shuts down its service in a matter of weeks. If all my photos were there and they'd just down I'd be very annoyed.<p>I get that they don't care about public opinion now - but it's still very frustrating when this sort of thing happens. It wouldn't kill them to stay open and close registration and then offer automatic migration to the service once it's integrated into Google - the user base gets preserved this way which is another win.
>Private Photo/Video Backup<p>I always backup my private anal wards photos to the cloud ... Damn Im old, I just cant understand new generation :(