Benjamin Kerensa

The Ramblings of a Beautiful Mind

OpenPhoto

Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr

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OpenPhoto on AndroidIf you have been living in a cave for the past few months then you would have missed the success of OpenPhoto which started as a Kickstarter project to liberate your photos and is now a full fledged Mozilla WebFWD project with a team of seasoned developers* that are leveraging their expertise and the contributions of their community to compete with the likes of Flickr and Picasa.

But lets look at a few reasons why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr as the Photo Management platform of choice for many users…

Freedom

OpenPhoto is Free Open Source Software that anyone can download at no cost and run on their own servers or could hack on if they so choose to make a custom install or even contribute some code with a pull request. Currently Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr lack the same openness that OpenPhoto aims to offer by making its source code available and further OpenPhoto also aims to allow more freedom in how you manage your photos.

 

Mobile Ready

OpenPhoto recently launched their iOS App and has a Android app in testing right now and both seem to work quite flawlessly and will allow you to manage and upload photos on the go whether your using the OpenPhoto.me hosted platform or running OpenPhoto on your own server, VPS or shared hosting.

Import from Anywhere

OpenPhoto aims to allow you to scour the internet and import all your photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and more so you can manage them all in one place.

You decide where to store photos

OpenPhoto gives you the freedom to store photos wherever you want right now OpenPhoto supports Amazon S3 and Dropbox but support for other storage services is on the roadmap and you can contribute a module with a simple pull request.

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. I guess my biggest question is how many of my readers are currently running OpenPhoto? Have you used one of the AMI’s on Amazon Web Services or perhaps done a Install on your Ubuntu Server?

 

*Note:  I’m currently a member of the OpenPhoto Team

 

 

 

 

What do Instagram and OpenPhoto have in common? Ubuntu!

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OpenPhoto

Do you use OpenPhoto?

Sean Kerner at InternetNews recently revealed the fact that Instagram which was recently acquired by Facebook uses Ubuntu Server 11.04 to power their cloud. OpenPhoto which was a Kickstarter project and is becoming very popular in the wake of the Instagram acquisition is also powered by Ubuntu Server 11.04 but offers users the ability to take total ownership of their photos and rapidly deploy a crisp new way to manage photos.

I’m actually in the process of working on a juju charm to allow even faster deployment of OpenPhoto installs within the cloud which should suit those using AWS quite nicely and have also joined the OpenPhoto Team to help with Community Management.

Anyways enough rambling… Go fork a copy of OpenPhoto and get to hacking!