Loom (YC W12) Launching Cloud Storage for Photos and Videos

As an early beta tester, I wanted to share my thoughts - not a feature by feature analysis or comparison to anything else out there associated with photos. I use all sorts of apps and software to create, share and store photos: Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr, iPhoto, Adobe Photoshop and Creative Cloud.<p>But, while I&#x27;ve gotten pretty good at taking, beautifying and sharing photos, storing them remains a nightmare. I think Loom has a new and needed approach - hopefully a fix to this difficult, puzzling problem. Personally, I’m pretty excited.

I would never trust a startup with my photos UNLESS they were building an open source platform that could run on my own hardware, similar to openphoto.<p>The fact is, I&#x27;d much rather have everything local and pay a backup provider a small annual fee to keep a client-side encrypted backup for me.<p>I have plenty of bandwidth to my house for sharing photos and videos with friends. All I&#x27;m missing is the low-power plug server to host the app. It doesn&#x27;t make sense for my photos and videos to live in a data center with low latency disk, Gbit networks and redundant power and cooling -- it&#x27;s total overkill.<p>Photo and video storage is a perfect application for user hosted SaaS since there&#x27;s so little cross-talk between users, and the vast majority of data is almost never looked at.<p>By the way, just because it&#x27;s running on my own hardware, doesn&#x27;t mean I wouldn&#x27;t pay a monthly fee for the software!

5GB doesn&#x27;t feel like enough... I&#x27;ve been using AWS&#x27; Glacier for my photos and it&#x27;s pretty much exactly what I needed, the digital equivalent of a big musty box tucked away in some inaccessible corner of the basement.

I&#x27;d love to be able to add the same photo to more than one album. This seems like the sort of thing that&#x27;s a natural advantage of digital photos over regular ones.<p>Let&#x27;s say I was taking pictures of friends at a baseball game, along with a couple of other shots of the surroundings. I want to put the pictures of friends in &quot;friends&quot; album, but I also want to put those same pictures in the overarching &quot;baseball&quot; album, or the album for that particular game. It seems as though you have nested albums, which is nice, but this would be a good usecase to look into.<p>Also, while I was playing around, I created an album that I wanted to get rid of. I deleted the album and it took all of the pictures in it out of my timeline. I probably should have figured that the albums act more as folders than tags when I discovered that pictures were assigned to a single album, but I can&#x27;t figure out how to reupload those pictures. Any help?<p>Congratulations on the launch!

As much as it seems like an interesting service and a problem that no one has quite solved the way I (and I think many others) want, I have a suspicion any company like this is more likely to be looking to get acquired by someone like Apple, who&#x27;s surely trying to figure out how to make iCloud be the solution people use for this problem. The thing about archiving photos is, the solution I want is a place to keep them for 30 years, and it&#x27;s hard to imagine that a VC-funded startup will be that company...

I hope Loom founders are reading this comment :-) ...<p>I want a feature of removing duplicates automatically with help of raw-meta-data hiding behind every digital pics&#x2F;movies .... is there any such service?<p>BTW why YC keep funding this kind of startup all the time ... I guess they are getting awesome exit as some big boys will acquire eventually even if you have only one nice features that you get traction with ...

I totally agree that cloud storage for photos is mostly broken but how does this help me with cloud storing the photos of my DSLR, a compact tough-cam, 2 Android phones? Any chance to keep Lightroom for developing the pics or is it a iPhone&#x2F;iPad only photo backup solution?

Been using this and it&#x27;s awesome. Have been so incredibly frustrated with iPhoto in the past...

Great job guys. Just created my account and have been messing around with the iPhone app for a few minutes. My first thought, the way you handle selecting multiple photos by swiping is genius.

&quot;Free up to 5GB&quot;. So will there be plans with limits or just 1 unlimited space plan? Any idea what the price point will be?<p>The biggest issue I have with photos is the cost of the storage. As much as I&#x27;d like sharing and convenient access and everything, right now I just dump them all in iPhoto on my mac and backblaze takes care of it.

Still going the iOS-first way? I do not know the figures and stats but I can personally say that I know a lot of people on Android (including me) who would want to use&#x2F;pay for something like this.<p>Anyway, Congrats on launching. Hope you can live up to the people&#x27;s expectations. This space really needs a good service.

It&#x27;d be nice if the landing page explained how you&#x27;re different from all the other options!

Looks interesting, but I&#x27;m already a customer of smugmug, and they&#x27;re claiming they&#x27;re launching something innovative at the end of the month. That said, I wouldn&#x27;t be adverse to jumping ship if this offering ends up being better.

Any chance Leopard support could be on the roadmap? Part of what makes Loom so exciting is the chance to get my photos un-confusingly off of older computers, so I was disappointed not to be able to install it on a 2006 MBP. Thanks!

How does this compare against things like Flickr and EverPix? I&#x27;d love a &quot;better&quot; solution, but I can&#x27;t seem to actually see a features breakdown or see how&#x2F;why I should move to using Loom.

I would love to have a cloud solution for personal pictures, etc but I do not see any mention about the security&#x2F; rights&#x2F; privacy. That would be my main concern for using a service like this.

Free up to 5GB. And after 5GB...?

Android support - do want.

So, what&#x27;s the main difference between Loom and Everpix?

Can one of the founders kindly clarify how long it takes for a photo to appear on Mac once it has been taken from an iPhone, both being connected to WiFi?<p>I have compared Photo Stream and Google+ for this scenario (i.e. taking photo on iPhone and see them appear on the respective cloud storages). Despite Google+&#x27;s awesome anytime-anywhere availability, its upload&#x2F;backup speed feels much slower compared to Photo Stream. But the fact that I need a garbage like iPhoto to access those photos on Mac makes it a deal-breaker for me.<p>So while I&#x27;m already sold on Loom&#x27;s Mac-based access to the photos, I&#x27;d be willing to jump ship if the following are satisfied:<p>1. Upload&#x2F;Backup should feel as instantaneous as Photo Stream, especially with WiFi connections.<p>2. (<i>This is different than my original point</i>) Loom shows commitment to its users by some kind of a promise that even if it gets acquired it will not shutdown the essential servers or at the very least not ask us to archive and download all the photos we&#x27;ve put into it so far. I had a lot of hope with Snapjoy and it turned into a killjoy after its Dropbox acquisition. I&#x27;d like to stick to a service like this on a long-term basis.

We sure have advanced a lot since the days of &quot;My Documents&quot; and &quot;My Photos&quot; folders in the local file system!<p>Hahaha, I&#x27;m such a joker.

It’s free up to 5GB?<p>That seems...niggardly.