

Loom (YC W12) Launching Cloud Storage for Photos and Videos - jansen
http://www.loom.com/

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sthommes
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.

But, while I'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.

~~~
cheeyoonlee
I totally get you. I'm actually very organized with everything stored across
all media _except_ photos taken with my iPhone. Currently, I've been using
Dropbox sync to auto upload my photos which I then manually organize into
albums...cumbersome process, but for me this manual process relieves an OCD
aspect lol.

I think Loom's fluid and extremely simple approach beats every previous app or
service I've considered in the past. Pretty excited to try it out.

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zaroth
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.

The fact is, I'd much rather have everything local and pay a backup provider a
small annual fee to keep a client-side encrypted backup for me.

I have plenty of bandwidth to my house for sharing photos and videos with
friends. All I'm missing is the low-power plug server to host the app. It
doesn'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's total
overkill.

Photo and video storage is a perfect application for user hosted SaaS since
there's so little cross-talk between users, and the vast majority of data is
almost never looked at.

By the way, just because it's running on my own hardware, doesn't mean I
wouldn't pay a monthly fee for the software!

~~~
blazzar
I 100% agree, I want a couple of local backups and an offsite emergency only
if they fail. In fact I hope this kickstarter can deliver that (no affiliation
with this, just a backer):

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-
brai...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-
your-devices?ref=category)

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percentcer
5GB doesn't feel like enough... I've been using AWS' Glacier for my photos and
it's pretty much exactly what I needed, the digital equivalent of a big musty
box tucked away in some inaccessible corner of the basement.

~~~
aarondf
Manually? Or using Arq or something? I'd love to hear more about your setup

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tropicalmug
I'd love to be able to add the same photo to more than one album. This seems
like the sort of thing that's a natural advantage of digital photos over
regular ones.

Let'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 "friends" album, but I also want to put those same pictures in the
overarching "baseball" 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.

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't figure out how to reupload those pictures. Any help?

Congratulations on the launch!

~~~
jansen
Thanks!

To add a photo to more than one album you can use the 'copy' function. But
yea, it would be easier if you could select multiple albums in one process.

Yes, deleting an album will delete its photos. We have a recovery function on
our side, but no display for users yet. Will add it soon.

Also, we don't have a way to re-upload photos yet, also very high on our
priority list!

~~~
tropicalmug
Thanks for the quick response. I keep playing with this and it's very cool.
I'm looking forward to being able to put those pictures back up.

Congrats on the launch again.

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greghinch
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'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's hard to imagine that a
VC-funded startup will be that company...

~~~
sthommes
In 30 years, my children will be starting to have children of their own. Apple
is only 36 years old. Google just turned 15. You're right, this is not a
problem for VC's investment attention horizon. People need a solution here
that will be around in 300 years...

~~~
epa
Spend some money and print your photos onto hard copies. They will last much
longer than the cloud and will be more secure from theft.

~~~
sthommes
When I was 12 I had treasure chest- an orange Vans shoebox full of printed
cards, which I had accumulated via acquisition (new, wrapped, plus stick of
gum from the Ice Cream truck) or trade. Included rookie Fisk, Killebrew and
Ryan, and an old Walter Johnson, Senators. My Mom threw them away while I was
away at college

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newsign
I hope Loom founders are reading this comment :-) ...

I want a feature of removing duplicates automatically with help of raw-meta-
data hiding behind every digital pics/movies .... is there any such service?

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 ...

~~~
jansen
Yes, we want that too. Not built yet, but on our roadmap!

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grundprinzip
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/iPad only photo backup solution?

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ajaymehta
Been using this and it's awesome. Have been so incredibly frustrated with
iPhoto in the past...

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perishabledave
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.

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pdenya
"Free up to 5GB". So will there be plans with limits or just 1 unlimited space
plan? Any idea what the price point will be?

The biggest issue I have with photos is the cost of the storage. As much as
I'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.

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asenna
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/pay for something like this.

Anyway, Congrats on launching. Hope you can live up to the people's
expectations. This space really needs a good service.

~~~
jansen
Thanks! We built Loom for iOS first simply because on our team we're all iOS
users and we wanted to build something we'd love ourselves and resolve our own
frustration with photo management. From here on, we can use all the great
feedback and build something great for Android, etc.

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Maro
It'd be nice if the landing page explained how you're different from all the
other options!

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shuzchen
Looks interesting, but I'm already a customer of smugmug, and they're claiming
they're launching something innovative at the end of the month. That said, I
wouldn't be adverse to jumping ship if this offering ends up being better.

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benwikler
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!

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modoc
How does this compare against things like Flickr and EverPix? I'd love a
"better" solution, but I can't seem to actually see a features breakdown or
see how/why I should move to using Loom.

~~~
jansen
There are features that set us apart from other products, but most importantly
- following our desire to build something fast, intuitive and where you don't
need to change your habits - we wanted Loom to have the potential to become
the default photo app. One example: we learnt that most people have some kind
of structure for photos (folders on an external hard drive, etc.) and they
would like to be able to preserve that structure. We give users that option
with Loom.

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

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

~~~
sthommes
Suggestion for the biz dev team at Loom: how about a "Loom Mortgage" for
unlimited > 5GB storage. Like a family home, all of your thousands of photos
should be an heirloom that passes on to the next generation. If it were say 1%
of your home value, and your mortgage is $2,000 per month, that would be $20
per month. I'd pay that

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codereflection
Android support - do want.

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benwikler
So, what's the main difference between Loom and Everpix?

~~~
savrajsingh
Looks like pricing is different -- also let's not forget PictureLife

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rogerchucker
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?

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+'s awesome anytime-anywhere availability, its upload/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.

So while I'm already sold on Loom's Mac-based access to the photos, I'd be
willing to jump ship if the following are satisfied:

1\. Upload/Backup should feel as instantaneous as Photo Stream, especially
with WiFi connections.

2\. ( _This is different than my original point_ ) 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'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'd like
to stick to a service like this on a long-term basis.

~~~
jansen
And for #2 yes, we are aware of this situation. We know startups seem risky.
We'll do our best not to disappoint anyone. Even if we had to migrate servers
at some point, our product is designed to avoid going through an awful process
(in particular, Loom isn't an enclosed photo library such as e.g. iPhoto)

~~~
rogerchucker
Thank you for responding to both the questions. Yes I had forgotten that other
annoyance of iPhoto - enclosing everything in a library. Looking forward to
using your service.

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AsymetricCom
We sure have advanced a lot since the days of "My Documents" and "My Photos"
folders in the local file system!

Hahaha, I'm such a joker.

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conception
It’s free up to 5GB?

That seems...niggardly.

~~~
aarondf
I read your comment and was aghast, then looked it up and your word is
_precisely_ what you meant [1].

Still... I wouldn't dare say that word when "stingy" would suffice. Yes, it IS
accurate, but perception still means so much, hence your downvoting into
oblivion.

[1]
[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/niggardly](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/niggardly)

~~~
conception
I'd hoped HN would have a larger vocab, but alas.

