Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

"You decide where to store photos"<p>That is most likely the reason this, as many other "open" alternatives, won't defeat proprietary solutions.<p>A normal human being won't bother setting up an S3 account and integrating with this service when they can just pay Flickr/Picasa and forget.

Hmmm, never heard of it.<p>I think to defeat Picasa and Flickr, first, it has to actually be known about...<p>The reasons given in the article are well, nice enough features, but they're absolutely not enough to guarantee success or domination... not even close. Major success is of course extremely fickle; it's not just major features that are important but all sorts of incidental stuff. In many cases, much of this comes down to luck as much as anything else (e.g. FB's big advantage was being in the right place, at the right time, and not screwing up that advantage completely), and is notoriously hard to predict.<p>So... good luck, I guess, but, well ... meh.

I'm the founder of the project. Benjamin is one of our community managers and I'm glad he wrote this.<p>The value of OpenPhoto differs for many people. Benjamin stated why he uses it and even volunteers his time to help make it successful.<p>What I'm focusing on is making it easy and useful for people to regain control and peace of mind that all their photos are safe, in one spot and enjoyable.<p>We are doing this a few different ways.<p>* As the article points out, letting users (optionally) choose whee their photos are stores. I say optionally because we provide storage for those who don't know what that means or don't want to.<p>* Allow people to import photos from Flickr, Instagram and Facebook. More coming soon.<p>* Enable folks to change their mind at any time with their choice of storage service. If they choose us and want to change or find a different service that is cheaper or suits them better, we make the migration seamless.<p>We're an open source project but as you'll see we are very consumer focused. It's why we have apps on the app stores and offer a "hosted version".<p>Happy to answer questions.

The problem with things like this is that it's doubtful whether this product will be ten times better than the alternatives, which is how much better it needs to be if it wants to displace the entrenched players, which already enjoy some lock-in through 3rd party integration. Simply offering a cheaper and open source alternative or a free alternative that requires somebody to link it up with Dropbox doesn't cut it. There has to be a killer feature, in my opinion.<p>Your average user will initially shop around for a service, stick with the one they find, and stop then simply stop considering alternatives unless the alternative is simply amazing or all their friends are using it.

<p><pre><code> If you have been living in a cave for the past few months... </code></pre> I want to stop reading right here.

Just when I wanted to learn more about the project, it appears to be down :(<p><a href="http://theopenphotoproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://theopenphotoproject.org/</a>

So, I was curious and tried installing it locally for a test drive.<p>The installation was painful (issues with imagemagick, for one). I installed from git, according to their installation guide [1].<p>The result is broken (for me/in general) on several levels. Let's start with the best one:<p>The configuration file that you generate during the intial setup of the application (from a UI. It's not my fault, I didn't miss anything, this file is totally autogenerated) has a different idea of the configuration parameter name for the password salt. Result? The admin account ends up in the db unsalted (or .. whatever their configuration returns for 'value not configured'), because it searches for 'passwordSalt' in the config and previously just dropped a 'secret' in there.<p>Why did I even notice that? Because I was hoping to use that thing with my wife. Two accounts, both allowed to upload. Seems to be a concept that this project doesn't support: For all I can tell only _one_ user is allowed to upload pictures. You can have multiple (local) users, but for that you need to read the code and edit the config file directly. Yeah - and figure out the salt bug above.<p>Uploading failed with a division by zero error when I used ImageMagick as backend.<p>The gallery sometimes _didn't show the image, just the tags and the general UI around_ (in both Chrome and FF). Quite a bad thing, since that is the only usecase.<p>It took me ages to understand how to delete images. The only way I found is hidden in some 'batch manipulation' dialog.<p>I could go on. It feels unfinished and rough. It doesn't solve my basic needs. Replacing Picasa and Flickr would be great, but this app is from away from it.<p>1: <a href="http://theopenphotoproject.org/documentation/guide/InstallationUbuntuApache" rel="nofollow">http://theopenphotoproject.org/documentation/guide/Installat...</a>

Even though it would be cool, I think that the situation is similar to Diaspora/Facebook, i.e. end users won't run their own servers and it would not be profitable for third parties to run them either.

I'd bet against this happening... nobody knows about this. Also, hasn't twitter, shared photo streams and Instagram/Facebook already "defeated" simple image hosting platforms?

OpenPhoto who? I had never heard of OpenPhoto until now, so I guess that kind of weakens the point of this article by about 50% straight up. Flickr in my opinion while having failed to stay relevant in a world of Instagrams and Facebook, it's still the best place to store your photos and from what I hear Marissa is focusing on Flickr quite heavily recently.<p>Free might seem better than $25 per month, but $25 per month for actual unlimited photo storage is something not even Dropbox or S3 can compete with. Not to mention Flickr has no barrier to entry, you upload your photos and don't have to worry about paying for a third party service like S3.<p>It's nice to dream that an open source Mozilla project can steal some of Flickr's thunder, but it isn't going to be happening any time soon.

&#62; Currently Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr lack the same openness<p>What lack of openness exactly? I can go to Picasa at any time and download a fully original picture (the very same picture I uploaded to Google's servers). I also have an API I can use to access Picasa and Flickr.<p>&#62; With all of the above reasons in mind and all the features that are being added its going to be hard to find any reason not to use OpenPhoto.<p>Yeah, Linux has been using the same tired argument for a couple of decades now. The bottom line is that "it's open and free" is not enough to convince millions of users to use your product.<p>&#62; Note: I’m currently a member of the OpenPhoto Team<p>Ah... ok, I wish I had read this first and I wouldn't even have bothered posting this.

Here is a hypothesis to examine - given the first computing revolution involved people determining how to use their computers by purchasing and installing software with the needed functionality, is a second such revolution where completely controllable personal storage and compute resources reside in the cloud, with individuals deciding how to put them to use by installing various server sofware components?<p>I'm personally sick of lockins and wouldnt mind a "desktop like" interface to installing and using software on servers. There were some startups that seemed to start down this path. Know of any that's moved further along in this direction?

This article has an asterisk at the beginning which leads to a footnote "Note: I’m currently a member of the OpenPhoto Team". This should be at the beginning, it sets the articles tone. I'd take it seriously if it was an outside source but being written by a developer on the project, for me it's a cute introduction to the software and it doesn't tell me whether this software is actually good.<p>What I do learn from this is that it would probably be a good solution for hack-it-yourself enthusiasts from the Linux community who always look for the open source solution.

&#62;"OpenPhoto is Free Open Source Software that anyone can download at no cost and run on their own servers"<p>So, back to the 1990s? Not that it's a bad thing, but aren't php scripts and wordpress plugins to do this kind of thing old hat and <i>pre-date</i> flickr, picasa, skydrive et all?<p>A well-designed 2013-era take on the problem may be interesting to see, but the mere existence of software to store, present and manage photos on your website is as mundane as can be. So, what's new here?

I hope I don't come off as cynical, but there's no way this project will ever 'defeat' Picasa or Flickr. It could very well end up being a successful project, but it will never be on top. Also drop the whole 'Open' and 'Free' thing when it comes to naming. No one outside of the dev community cares about or even acknowledges the existence of FOSS. This project sounds great, it just doesn't seem tailored or marketed towards a mass userbase.

&#62; If you have been living in a cave for the past few months then you would have missed the success of OpenPhoto<p>I don't live in a cave, and while OpenPhoto is promising, it's quite a bit premature to call it "a success", especially in the presence of competitors boasting millions of users such as Picasa and Flickr.<p>Let's talk again once OpenPhoto reaches a million users.

I've used it since summer now. It's mostly ok, but it sucks for actually viewing any photos as they are really really small and most of the screen estate is just navigation stuff.<p>I hope at some point in the future it will be useful for its intended purpose: viewing photos.<p>Seems to be down at the moment as well...

Can the android and the iPhone app be used for sharing photos through email or with with Facebook, Twitter and Google+?

Why every project whose name starts with "Open-" is to be considered a future success?