[nchuhoai]

IMHO the most important feature any service that I trust my most previous assets, my photos with, is the ease of which I can take my photos off.

I currently have around 60 gigs of photos that I am in desperate need for an easy solution for sharing and storage for. Even keeping it in the iPhoto folder format right now makes me dizzy for the future, but I havent found one service yet that meet me criteria. Most are great for sharing, but most of them depend on a certain lock-in effect. There is, as far as I can see, no easy way to move your photos very quickly from one host to another.

With snapjoy, it seems you are only able to download the images one by one.

[jmathai]

Have a look at OpenPhoto (self installed or hosted, a la Wordpress). Lets you select where you want your photos to be stored (Dropbox, S3, etc) and provides web and mobile apps to access them. Also, completely open source[1].

http://theopenphotoproject.org

Disclaimer: I'm the lead dev on OpenPhoto

[1] https://github.com/openphoto/frontend

[webwanderings]

Why should I use a photo app if I'm using Dropbox?

[jmathai]

We actually blogged about this[1].

Dropbox isn't really optimized for photos. It does a great job backing up and syncing across devices but that's about where it stops in relation to photos.

We provide a layer on top of Dropbox. You can better organize your photos using albums or tags. Metadata from your photos are automatically extracted (title, tags, geolocation). There's a proper photo API for creating and using additional apps. There's plenty more but the blog post[1] covers it well if you're curious or ping me :).

http://blog.theopenphotoproject.org/post/27569670276/all-you...

[siculars]

Under no circumstance will I keep photos natively in the iPhoto application/folder. What I do is go to the advanced tab in iPhoto and tell iPhoto NOT to pull a copy into it's directory. Simply unload your photos into the filesystem somewhere and drop that folder in iPhoto. Keeping your photos beholden to iPhoto is just asking for trouble.

[jfb]

Keeping your photos beholden to iPhoto is just asking for trouble.

Why? I'm curious. Do you believe that iPhoto will stop being able to export your photos?

[siculars]

The way I look at it is that photos equal files and files should be in folders accessible via a simple file manager. iPhoto subverts that model turning it on its head and makes your photos beholden to it by burying them within its internal structure. iTunes does a similar thing to music files.

It is clear that Apple is attempting to abstract away user control over their digital assets by giving that control to their applications.

[jfb]

Ah. OK. Personally, I care about my photos and music; the files are incidental to the content. Both iTunes and iPhoto (or Aperture, in my case) privilege the content over the file structure, and to my way of thinking, that's correct behaviour. Of course, to each their own.

[nchuhoai]

I agree and wish I had not done that. But before I go through all the hassle and export everything, I want to make to make sure not to run into the exact same problem again.