[dpark]

I agree. "Choose your own storage system" is not a feature for at least 99% of the people who use a photo-sharing service. To the typical user, choosing your storage system means choosing Flickr, or Picasa, or SmugMug, or OpenPhoto, or whatever else. It doesn't mean choosing OpenPhoto+S3 vs OpenPhoto+Dropbox. That's not a real choice. You're still tied to OpenPhoto, even if your files are stored on S3.

Your files (and especially your metadata) aren't going to magically migrate from OpenPhoto+S3 to Picasa unless he's also planning on writing a tool for that, in which case I'd suggest that investing in his startup is an even worse idea than it seems at first, because he's spending time on features that only benefit non-customers.

Thus guy seems caught up in architecture astronomy, which is frankly not something that I see too many people paying money for.