
Tell HN: You said not to. So I quit my job and started. 5 mos later: OpenPhoto - jmathai
Original Ask HN post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184603<p>Almost a year ago I asked if you would pay for a photo management and sharing service that allowed you to store your photos into your own Amazon S3 bucket. The overall response seemed to be NO.<p>A few months later in May I decided to leave my job at Yahoo! and pursue it full time anyway. Shortly after I launched it as a Kickstarter project[1] it ended up getting coverage on Techcrunch[2], RWW[3], and TNW[4]. I reached the goal of $25k on the last day of fundraising on Kickstarter.<p>In August we were the first project to be accepted into Mozilla's WebFWD program[5]. I say we because by this point there was a community helping build OpenPhoto. Did I mention it's 100% free and open source? That's pretty important.<p>What was originally pitched as a "Wordpress-like" photo service is now a full fledged photo management and photo sharing platform. The OpenPhoto API powers not only the web client but an Android and iOS client as well (not yet in the app store). I had originally thought it would take me 2 months to build but it's taken me and a team of volunteers 5 months.<p>What we've built is orders of magnitude beyond what I had originally envisioned and I think OpenPhoto stands a chance to actually disrupt the photo space by giving control and ownership of people's photos back to them.<p>To find out more about OpenPhoto go to http://theopenphotoproject.org<p>Here are a few invites:<p><pre><code>  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zd065
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zd635
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zd92d
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdb3f
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdd72
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdde9
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdfbd
</code></pre>
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-photo-service-for-your-s3-or-dropbox-a<p>[2] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/former-yahoo-engineer-quits-to-build-a-flickr-killer-on-kickstarter/<p>[3] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/save_your_photos_to_amazon_or_dropbox_with_app_pla.php<p>[4] http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/07/16/creating-a-portable-web-when-your-data-is-truly-yours/<p>[5] http://blog.webfwd.org/post/9300091721/webfwd-welcomes-the-first-fellows
======
physcab
You should try A/B testing your copy.

I don't understand the concept of openness and liberation as it applies to
photos. To me, those are political concepts, not technological ones. Maybe I'm
not in your target market, but to me it makes much more sense to tie "sync"
and "share" to your copy more so than "open" and "liberation".

For example, if the name of your service was PhotoSync, and then if I went to
the front page and saw a comparison between your service, Facebook, Flickr,
and ICloud, I'd be very curious to see what you could offer over the options
available to me.

Best to ride the coattails of those companies that have invested orders of
magnitude more money to educate the market than to educate them yourselves.

~~~
seltzered_
Please put an example openphoto site linked up front. I still can't figure out
what an openphoto site looks like and feel like I dug through everything.

I'm more picky about a photo gallery's look-and-feel off the bat before I
think about proposing/coding changes to it.

~~~
jmathai
Great point. The sites are 100% themeable but here's one of our default
themes. <http://current.openphoto.me>

~~~
vosper
Might I suggest you change the pictures on this example site - two of the
first three are of the (clothed) rear-end of a small child, and the headless
nature of the pictures makes them an odd and slightly uncomfortable thing to
be presented with; if I had been browsing at work I'd have closed the window.

~~~
jmathai
Well...when you put it that way it _is_ a little disturbing :). I'll select
better photos for that site.

------
wasd
If I could make one suggestion, please make it more clear what your website
and service does. The front page mentions that I have total "photo liberation"
but that's just sort of buzz. I clicked on "overview" (not sure how many
people would make it that far) and the headline is "Like WordPress for Photos"
but if I wasn't tech savvy, I would have no idea what WordPress does. I spent
about 2 minutes on the website (much longer than any consumer) and I still
didn't quite get it.

Also, on the see the difference page it might help to compare yourself to
Flickr and other photo services.

I don't mean any disrespect or offense, I just don't think your website is
immediately clear.

~~~
armandososa
I'm pretty sure that if you have an S3 account, chances are you'll know
WordPress.

But I agree that better copy is needed.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Great job! I love your product.

There is something out there that could help you sharpen the copy on your
site: <http://www.copyhackers.com>

~~~
jmathai
Thanks for that link. Will definitely check it out!

------
viraptor
> curl <https://..>. | /bin/bash

Really? At least it's https, but how about building a proper package nightly,
or commit-ly? You already assume ubuntu and apache, so this could be just a
static, easily uninstallable deb. The script makes loads of dangerous
assumptions.

"apt-get upgrade --assume-yes --quiet" - please don't assume stuff about other
people's systems.

"apt-get install loads_of_stuff" - this effectively makes it impossible to
remove all unneeded deps later on.

"ifconfig eth0 | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'" - that's
bound to fail in many cases - either return just 0.0.0.0, or try to find the
actual default interface:

    
    
        DEV=$(ip r l match 0 | grep -Po '(?<=dev )\S+')
        IP=$(ip a s dev $DEV | grep -Po '(?<=inet )[^/]+')
    

Otherwise - I like the idea :)

~~~
jmathai
<https://github.com/openphoto/frontend/tags>

The warning above that shell script is there for a reason. I hope nobody
_actually_ does that (except me since I know it's sane and need to spin up
instances regularly).

~~~
moe
You should just remove the script or make clear that it will potentially
annihilate the victims host up to the point of rendering it unbootable.

"apt-get upgrade" is not a safe operation. It will install new kernels and
boot-loaders and it may get terribly confused in the face of pinned packages
or mixed repositories. "--assume-yes" is a _really_ bad idea and running "apt-
get upgrade" is none of your installers business in first place.

------
yllus
I'll join the others in saying congratulations and good work. I'm interested
in using OpenPhoto myself, but like a few others who commented I'm a little
unsure of what I get out of it.

If you don't mind a bit of hopefully helpful criticism, perhaps change the
three-item rotator at the top of <http://theopenphotoproject.org/> to the
following:

\- A gorgeous web album to show off your photos (getting across that a Flickr-
like interface to view photos comes with the product)

\- Free mobile app for iOS and Android (getting across that a mobile app
interface to view photos comes with the product)

\- Take back your photos (change the long description here to state more
clearly that you have full file-level access to your photos, hosted on a
server you "own")

\- Free, open and easy to use (perfect as it is)

\- Flexible API & apps (perfect as it is)

That initial point-form section should get across everything you need to know,
and I don't think it currently does. Lastly, I'd love an invite if you
wouldn't mind sending one to sully AT yllus DOT com.

~~~
jmathai
Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate it and we'll include that in our
revision which we need to do soon based on HN comments! :)

Can you send an email to hello@openphoto.me? Swamped with invites and that way
you won't fall through the cracks.

~~~
yllus
Will do! Actually was a bit egotistical of me to expect the reverse, hah.

It's a shame that you couldn't get empowered at Yahoo to turn Flickr into
this. Maybe they'll buy you back (as talent) and give you the big chair to run
things? ;)

~~~
jmathai
Hahaha, I was asked so many times why I didn't stay at Yahoo with this idea.
Upper management at Yahoo would have made sure to do whatever they could to
get promotions while killing the product.

------
tsunamifury
Have you considered that professional media organizations currently pay north
of 15-20k dollars a year for cloud photo storage apps that merely read and
organize the metadata?

In fact I have someone at NPR right now looking for this exact service, but
made whitelable/private for internal use.

Not saying thats a direction, but just an FYI

~~~
jmathai
I've personally thought about it, yes. Focused on consumers at the moment but
am aware the enterprise needs decent photo management software desperately.

If you know of someone I'd love to talk to them about using OpenPhoto (it's
free and open source, afterall). jaisen@openphoto.me

------
angdis
This is an extremely compelling idea for users who run their own websites.
However, it is not clear what the pricing trade-offs are for a consumer (for
example flickr) user.

I would want to transfer my stuff out of flickr right away if there was a non-
painful way to determine how much I'd be paying to amazon for s3 storage of my
photos. I have thousands of photos, but haven't actually counted them. Is
there an easy way from within flickr to compute the total storage I'd need?

Flickr-pro has been a very good deal at $25/year (for virtually unlimited
storage with some annoying terms/conditions). What will OpenPhoto be priced
at?

~~~
jmathai
If you use he hosted version and the storage provided by OpenPhoto it should
be tiered and competitive to Flickr.

If you use your own personal storage (i.e. S3 bucket) then the cost is between
you and the provider (Amazon).

I've got about 25GB of photos (≈4k in number) and it runs me just under
$3/month on S3.

------
OoTheNigerian
Hey man,

Great idea. I have a few suggestions.

1\. Take advantage of the traffic!! Even though I do not have an invite,
create a way take my email address so when there is more space, you can tell
me. You have my attention now, use it.

2\. Describe Open-Photo in English. I am sure you do not want this to be for
developers only. 90% of people do not really care if it is open source or
understand the 'liberated data' terminology. :)

Here is what I think you are building: The ultimate photo backup and
organization platform. The very first place you put all your photographs. From
there you decide what to post on FB, Picassa or Flickr. Best of all, you
control it all.

3\. Use the Gowalla shut down as PR. Imagine all the photos that were shared
there; people have suddenly been told to take their shit by Jan. Describe how
with OpenPhoto would have made things different for the user. tptacek things
the users are owed nothing, therefore with open photo, they can take care of
themselves. See (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318527>)

4\. Find how to make money out of this. We want you to be on this project in
10 years and for that to happen, you have to make money. Your bills will only
keep increasing. You can think of the WP model or something.

All the best and keep us updated.

~~~
jmathai
Thanks, especially for

#1. Enough motivation for me to stay up and send out the invites tonight.

#2 is consistent feedback and I'll be working on that.

#3 Good idea.

#4 been thinking about this and I know how important it is to figure out how
this is going to allow me to keep working on it :).

Thanks again!

------
a3camero
You're living the HN dream by quitting your job to do your own thing, so how's
it going? Are you better off doing this than working at Yahoo?

I'm sure other people are curious too.

~~~
jmathai
That's a separate post altogether. I'm definitely not just living the good
life as I have a wife, a 2 year old son and another on the way. My wife stays
at home with our son. So this is serious sh*t for me :).

It's going great though. I've had numerous side projects and co-founded a
startup for a few years earlier (no successful outcome). This has received
much more traction and interest so I'm riding that out and trying to build it
into something I can do for a long time.

~~~
dlf
lmao... "not just living the good life as I have a wife"

~~~
jmathai
Glad my wife's unaware of Hacker News' existence.

------
libraryatnight
I was one who donated to your Kickstarter for early access, and I am pleased
with your results so far. I just wanted to comment and thank you for your hard
work.

~~~
jmathai
Thank YOU for supporting :).

------
joebadmo
This makes me kind of tingly inside. It feels like the beginning of a viable
'personal cloud.'

<http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/6277876911/the-personal-cloud>

I can't seem to find anything about access control, though, (who can see which
photos). Is anything like this in the works?

Anyway, this looks awesome, and I'm excited to get started when I get home
from work tonight!

~~~
jmathai
Photos can be private or public. If they are private you can share them with
others via their email address. The authentication system for OpenPhoto isn't
tied to any single provider. We prefer BrowserID but can support anyone who
authenticates that a user owns an email address. For example, we have a
Facebook Connect plugin.

~~~
joebadmo
Thanks, that's awesome!

------
jmathai
Clickable link: <http://theopenphotoproject.org>

------
Maro
Some feedback:

I think you should make your landing page clearer. Having looked at it, I
don't really know what OpenPhoto is. It's not clear where to click to get a
simple explanation. Maybe you should put up a short 1-minute video.

I think the liberation angle is not a good pitch. I'm a paying Flickr user,
but the primary storage for my photos is iPhoto / my hard drive. I just use
Flickr for sharing, so I'm not worried.

I don't think you should compete on price. As you know, Flickr costs $25/year,
which is already low enough to just not matter.

Some issues:

1\. My 'Pictures' folder is currently 76GB. On S3, that would cost
$127.68/year to store. There's no way I'd pay that much.

2\. Once it's on S3, browsing and photo editing would be dog-slow.

3\. Would your Web UI be as nice as Flickr's?

~~~
jmathai
Thanks for the feedback.

1) You might be able to just set up OpenPhoto pointing to your hard drive and
make your photos web accessible and easily searchable. You could also push to
your drive from your mobile device. There's lots of room for unique use cases
:).

2) You think? You could always throw CloudFront in front of S3 if you wanted.
It won't be as fast as your local disk but it should be pretty fast.

3) That's the goal. Better actually. The UI is completely themeable so I see a
lot of potential to have themes specific to different types of users.

~~~
Maro
Let me say again that I think OpenPhoto is a good/interesting idea.

My responses:

1) It's a laptop that's constantly moving / offline, so no. I think you should
take this issue seriously, because users like myself perceive hard drive space
to be "free" or at least we already paid for it, but paying $10/mo just for
photo storage seems kind of steep compares to the harddrive+Flickr $2/mo
option.

2) Come on now... I think you should think of some nifty sync feature so
people can edit locally and upload async.

3) Great! If you have a nice UI, you should put a nice big picture on the
landing page right in my face!

------
ljlolel
This is a brilliant idea. Screw diaspora, this is a trend toward the first
viable open source Facebook killer. Disruptive innovation in a product with
not enough features redefining the game.

~~~
jmathai
I can't tell if you're being serious or joking....can you rephrase? :)

------
dazbradbury
I find it strange you suggest web users should no longer trust services like
flickr/facebook/picasa to stay around and keep hold of your precious photos,
but you're aiming at consumers and guiding them to services such as
S3/Dropbox...

Why is S3/Dropbox more likely to stick around than anything else?

I get that you offer hosting on essentially any filesystem, but the main
message is somewhat mixed, don't you think?

~~~
jmathai
It's not about S3/Dropbox/etc as much as it is about decoupling the service
from the storage mechanisms. Once you do that then a whole lot of
opportunities present themselves which otherwise didn't exist.

So yes, Amazon may ditch S3 but if the file system is decoupled from the
service you're using and there are adapters for alternatives (which there are)
then it's trivial to migrate without any "loss of service".

That's the worst case scenario...which isn't too bad.

Note, there's local file system and mysql adapters as well if you don't trust
Amazon/Dropbox.

------
EvanYou
You really need to think about how to make your website more consumer
friendly. I read through the entire front page and couldn't figure out what
exactly this product is and how it works to achieve all the liberation you're
talking about. If your front page fail to pinpoint the core value to a non
tech-savvy customer, it's unlikely to be picked up by mainstream attention.

~~~
jmathai
Thanks for the feedback. The .org page is primarily for early adopters who
really want to know how OpenPhoto works, developers and theme designers.

End consumers will wind up at <http://openphoto.me> (think wordpress.org vs
wordpress.com). The consumer site was designed by myself who has no creative
talent but it's geared more to what you were suggesting (I hope). It needs a
lot of work though.

------
__ingrid__
I agree with other comments you need to change your wording on the home page.
I'm not really sure who you're pitching this to, but if it's to a non-
technical crowd you need to simplify it. It would also be great if you made a
page with examples of how to use OpenPhoto, because there seem to be many
possibilities, but reading the home page didn't make me think of them.

That being said, I majored in Game Development and I could definitely see the
artists in the program using this for their portfolios. Most of them use
Deviant Art portfolios (<http://portfolio.deviantart.com/>) which is not fully
customizable and doesn't look very professional. Some of them bug a technical
friend to help them make a real site but then it becomes hard for them to
maintain it on their own. There are artists at my schol who make their own
site, but it is a small group, and an even smaller subset of them have NICE
looking sites.

EDIT: Oops, typo.

------
ark15
Great start! +1 to the fact that you got something out.

In one of the comments you say "You should use this if you care about having a
central repository of all your photos, owning and controlling them and want
some level of choice."

Sounds nice except that I still don't understand what it _exactly_ means.

If you take some typical photo management workflow/use cases of typical
people-who-take-photos-of-their-family-and/or-pets, and then explain how
openphoto improves it, it will help.

My typical use case - -Photos (& videos) are dumped into a folder on a
computer. (Usually sub folder in the format YYYY-MM-OptionalOccasion) -Use
Picasa to upload to, er, picasa (paid picasa user) -Selectively share albums
with friends and family -Done. -(Separate backup process backups everything on
computer including these photos)

If you can tell me how openphoto will improve this part of my life, I am
willing to listen and maybe even open my wallet.

~~~
jmathai
Good questions. One of the goals is to allow users to continue using their
existing workflow. So we've got plans to make plugins available for as many
apps as possible (aperture, iphoto, lightroom, etc).

We've also got sync features planned to sync your Flickr or Picasa account to
your OpenPhoto one. Not sure what Picasa offers over OpenPhoto but Flickr has
a community which you may still want to share photos with. Same goes for
Facebook.

On Android you can set every photo you take to be uploaded to OpenPhoto if
you're using the OpenPhoto app or not. We're not interested in fighting to be
the default photo app. If we are, then great.

Not sure if that answers your questions. If not you can drop me an email
(jaisen@openphoto.me) and we can discuss. I'd love to know how it does or
doesn't work for you.

------
mikegreenberg
I haven't had an opportunity to delve into the technicalities of your value
prop, but why not dovetail your efforts with projects like LockerProject or
ThinkUp which are also open source. They have a vision very much in-line with
yours (at first glance) and have an established userbase which is growing as
well. Wouldn't some consensus between these data-liberation projects benefit
the userbase more than having a separate photo-liberation app?

These are honest, sincere questions and not intentionally poopoo-ing on your
well-earned success.

~~~
jmathai
I met with the LockerProject folks several months ago. Our vision _is_ very
much in line and we do keep in touch via Twitter.

I hope we get to some sort of concensus but it's really a lot of work :).
We're strapped for resources as it is. I'd like to work together where it
makes sense (acquiring and sharing users) and then figure out how the pieces
fit together. I think that's entirely possible.

For many things we will all be using shared technologies such as oStatus for
federation.

------
tgrass
Screen capture. Your heading elements are off (javascript issue?) - Chrome

<http://www.diigo.com/item/image/15sdb/njh2>

~~~
jmathai
We're tracking that here. It's chrome on windows...

<https://github.com/openphoto/community/issues/17>

~~~
tgrass
So it's a function of the font?!? Odd.

~~~
jmathai
It's a webfont. I'm not as familiar with it myself so having on of the front
end guys look into it.

~~~
daytripper99
Came here to say this. <http://imgur.com/Z8fXM>

------
richardkmichael
This is very inspiring and congratulations! The overall site design is quite
nice, and others have commented on the amount of text on the Overview page.

Could you discuss 1/ your business model (is it just paid premium features on
the hosted version?) ; 2/ how you decided $25k would be good to start with on
Kickstarter ; and (unrelated) 3/ what happened to thescholarapp.com (ad-parked
now - whatever was there is gone)?

Excited to see where you go with OpenPhoto!

~~~
jmathai
The primary focus is getting people using the software hosted or self
installed.

The business model is on the hosted side via freemium + premium services.

$25k seemed like an okay threshold to prove market validation. Less than that
and I wouldn't have felt comfortable enough people wanted something like this.
It was not related to the actual cost of building OpenPhoto which has far
exceeded that so far :).

The Scholar App we abandoned because the education space sucks and has too
much friction for innovation. Hopefully others stick it out there because we
are in dire need of innovation in education.

------
jcwilliams
I couldn't figure out in 5 minutes what this service is really for. After 10
minutes, I'm still not sure. Worse, my immediate reaction was "Does the world
really need another photobucket or imageshack?" I'm not even excited about the
product yet, and I have to do research to figure what it even does that is
unique or desirable? Something needs to be done to explain it better so people
are excited immediately.

~~~
jcwilliams
After reading the kickstarter page, I have a much better idea of the benefits
of this. Suggestion: Replace the contents of the home page with the contents
of the kickstarter page. The explanation and bullet points there are _way_
better.

------
jgeerts
Great site and I wish you the best of luck, there is (was?) indeed a need for
a personal photo storage service that is not Flickr, Picasa, Facebook or
Dropbox.

One thing that I would change in the overview, give a hint of how the pages
for the user will look like, not a bunch of small text. I don't think that
anyone will read the text, but they will take 3 seconds to check out your
sites features.

And also, add more invites... ;)

~~~
jmathai
Yup, we're gonna do a lot of rework on the front page content after hearing
all the comments here.

Follow us and ask on Twitter (<http://twitter.com/openphoto>) or send an email
to hello@openphoto.me for an invite.

------
ednc
Like the concept, and have been looking for something like this for all the
baby photos.

Feedback: \- The checkboxes for DropBox vs S3 should be radio buttons. \- The
hover text for Dropbox vs S3 should also work on the selection control (not
just the text). It was not obvious how to find it. A little (info) icon on the
end would be even better.

Add some more invite codes, and I'll get in there and send more feedback. :-)

~~~
jmathai
Thanks. The problem with radio buttons is that once you click a radio button
it's not possible to "unselect" all of them unless you have a "none" option.

Since neither of the checkboxes are not required and they are mutually
exclusive (they're not really just a restriction on the hosted version for
simplicity) -- we went with checkboxes and javascript :).

------
carlsverre
More invites would be awesome! This looks great! :)

~~~
jmathai
If you ask on Twitter (@openphoto) we'll send them out. Swamped otherwise and
just posting them publicly means they disappear immediately :)

------
perssontm
Really nice, I've been waiting for this and checking it out from time to time
during the autumn.

A few screenshots of a real gallery would have been nice, or a feature list.
Its really technical as of now. The oneline installer looks really cool, but a
bit scary, the script looked safe though, so I might try that.

Great work, will try it out in the near future. :)

~~~
jmathai
Thanks for the feedback. Our example site is at <http://current.openphoto.me>
\--- but keep in mind the UI is 100% themeable.

------
test001only
The font you used for heading seems to be not working in my chrome browser. I
have never had a problem with fonts before. Here is a screenshot
<http://i.imgur.com/N4xO9.jpg> .

~~~
jmathai
Thanks, we're tracking it here.

<https://github.com/openphoto/community/issues/17>

------
tmcw
Hooray! When this becomes generally available, I'll be totally in. Love the
concept.

------
four
Yup. I'm in. Been waiting since Kickstarter announcement. Yes, website copy,
UX need work. Tweeted you for an invitation. Thinking of putting OP+S3 under
the tree for family gifts. Go get 'em!

------
nhangen
You are indirectly competing with something I'm working on, so I won't comment
on the business, but I will say that I thought your old site design was 100x
better. Why did you change?

------
tait
Congratulations! Looks interesting; what are some use cases?

~~~
jmathai
Thanks!

That's one of the hardest parts is to narrow use cases down.

What we're focusing on at the moment is for consumers. It provides a way to
synchronize/aggregate your photos from across multiple photo services into one
location (that you have the option to own/control). We haven't built all of
the connectors but that's in the pipeline.

From a technical perspective, decoupling the service from the database and
filesystem (basically allowing users to provide their own) opens up a lot of
opportunities. We're paying a lot of attention to which opportunities look the
most interesting.

There's an entirely separate use case for businesses which we haven't even
touched. Any business that was weary of putting their photos on Flickr now has
a compelling alternative that will satisfy any of their paranoia.

------
epikur
I would just suggest more screenshots of the interface, on openphoto.me and
theopenphotoproject, because that lets me understand it much faster than
reading copy.

~~~
jmathai
Agreed, someone else said similar. Will add that.

------
organico
Hey, congratulations on not taking the advice of others, and going with your
heart - The project looks fantastic, and I'm really excited to migrate my
photos!

~~~
jmathai
Thanks. Project is just started, lots of amazing things in the pipeline.

------
BasDirks
You might want to tweak your css, whitespace especially, it's all just a bit
off. ik@basdirks.eu if you want me to take a look at it, of course gratis.

------
urza
Is it possible to store the photos on my own sever instead of Amazon or
Dropbox etc?

How are the photos and tags stored on the filesystem layer?

~~~
hub_
That's what I do at <http://photo.shutterbugging.net/>

(this is an older version of OpenPhoto)

I host it on Dreamhost. No root access, flat file system for the photos, MySQL
provided by Dreamhost.

There are some known issues, but this will definitely evolve for the better.
That's why I wrote the MySQL and localfs originally, thanks to jmathai clean
design.

------
thom
It seems like every year a product comes along that "changes everything", just
when I'm getting the hang of everything. :(

~~~
joebadmo
Funny, my reaction was more like: It seems like every year a product comes
along that "changes everything", just when all seems lost to boring, staid,
centralized services that I don't have control over. Yay!

------
samstave
I NEED THIS!!!!

Can you please send me an invite code? sam [at] sstave.com

Seriously - I MUST have this. I have wanted this for years.

Please email me an invite.

~~~
jmathai
Me too man, me too. I actually migrated all of my photos to the service last
night in an attempt to dogfood and get all of the missing features in by being
annoyed :).

Drop an email to hello@openphoto.me so you don't fall through the cracks.

------
adib
Do you make more (as in the money that you keep for yourself) from OpenPhoto
than what Yahoo paid you?

~~~
jmathai
I've invested (aka lost) much more money with OpenPhoto that I presume most
people would feel comfortable with. It's about as high risk of an investment
as you can make :).

~~~
adib
Wow, that and a stay-at-home wife, and two kids... I hope you _really_ know
what you're doing.

~~~
jmathai
Me too, me too.

------
AznHisoka
Sounds like Diaspora for photos...

~~~
jmathai
It's similar to Diaspora. We haven't built the federated parts but it's on the
roadmap.

I've got a ton of respect for the Diaspora folks but we're focusing much more
on the average user and making the software appealing to them (which means
easy to use). Diaspora also has to overcome the chicken & egg problem which we
can work around fairly easily by providing value even when your friends aren't
on OpenPhoto.

------
naithemilkman
Others have said this but I too don't quite get completely what your site is
about.

~~~
jmathai
Yup, looks like we've got a lot to do on the messaging front :). This video
might help (it's helped others) -
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-
phot...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-photo-
service-for-your-s3-or-dropbox-a)

------
chintan
Great project. Any special reason why you chose PHP? Was it to attract WP-
devs?

~~~
jmathai
Just because it's the runtime with the largest install base. We wanted anyone
to be able to run it on virtually any host. The dependencies are carefully
kept to a minimum.

Not so much to attrace WP-devs but I do think WP owes its success in part to
PHP.

------
viggity
this looks like an awesome project, I'll definitely sign up, but how are you
going to make any money? Sure, the $25K from kickstarter was nice, but how are
you going to continue to make money?

~~~
jmathai
What $25k :). We're working on premium features for the hosted version.

------
lforrest
Great update! It's exciting to have you in the Mozilla WebFWD program.

~~~
jmathai
Forrest, awesome to meet you on HN. Talk to you in 30 minutes ;)

------
ashr
This is a nice idea executed well. Don't stop here.

~~~
jmathai
Thanks, no plans on stopping anytime soon :)

------
kposehn
Glad to see another success on here as well :)

~~~
jmathai
Thanks. A few small successes but the project has a long uphill battle ahead
:)

------
angryasian
at this time is this basically just a prettier s3 console/dropbox, interface ?

edit: honest question cause I can't use the service.

~~~
jmathai
It's a full fledged photo platform for S3/Dropbox/etc. In addition to
displaying your photos nicely (and in a themeable manner) the platform
provides exif extraction for tags, title, geo location, etc. All of that
information then becomes searchable via the API.

There are plugins, webhooks, etc. At the risk of sounding arrogant it's pretty
awesome what the community has built.

------
salimmadjd
Congrats for the move and much success!

------
__sImius
Right on man, keep the dream alive.

------
juiceandjuice
A Django plugin would be rad.

~~~
jmathai
If you're up to writing it then let us know as we're hosting official
libraries under the OpenPhoto account on Github.

------
mapster
Why should I use this anyway? (btw - useless invite codes)

~~~
jmathai
Useless just means you were late :)

You should use this if you care about having a central repository of all your
photos, owning and controlling them and want some level of choice. If you
don't care about those things then there's always Facebook :)*.

By no means is OpenPhoto meant to replace Facebook, it compliments it quite
well.

~~~
ednc
Ok, I'm late too, how about a few more codes?

~~~
jerfelix
I was disappointed that my guesses at valid invite codes didn't work.

Like:

    
    
         ' or '1'='1

~~~
jmathai
That would have been embarassing.

