[hospadam]

So this looks amazing... and I want to buy into it... but I was just burned by Snapjoy several months ago.

I feel like I'll pay the money... spend my time syncing my library and getting everything organized... and then someone else is going to snatch you guys up and shut it down.

Clearly you guys have a business model and a product you're selling. If I can't even rely on you guys being in business long-term, what can I do? But you guys have built an amazing product! Keep up the good work!

[veb]

I completely agree with you. I looked at the site originally, and thought, "eh. another app that's going to be bought out by someone, probably" and left.

After reading some of the comments here, I went back and read it more carefully, and it totally looks like something I'd gladly pay a subscription to, but I've been burned before when places have closed after they've been bought out, it's not a nice feeling.

I'm still contemplating it though! It looks awesome.

[slowernet]

I've also been thinking about this irony the past year or so. The startups that most evidently have their shit together in terms of product, design, branding, etc. are in a way the least "believable in", since they seem likely to quickly become catnip for acquirers. Sparrow, for one.

[wavesounds]

And what exactly happens to your pictures if the company is bought?

Looks like a good service, wish they had a clearer privacy policy and some guarantees.

[swisspol]

(Everpix founder here) We tried to make our privacy policy pretty clear and relatively easy to read at https://www.everpix.com/legal/privacy.html. What parts did you think were not detailed enough?

[wavesounds]

Do I still own my pictures once they are uploaded to your server? Does keeping my pictures stored on your server after the privacy policy changes count as 'continued use of the service'?

What Im getting at is if you get bought by Microsoft, where does it say that Microsoft cant take my pictures and use them in their next ad or sell them to someone else?

[swisspol]

(Everpix founder here) Ah I see. Sorry I should have pointed you out to our Terms of Services instead [1]. Our Privacy Policy mostly covers what we do with visitor's data.

Because Everpix ends up storing the entire life in photos of each of our users, we are very very careful with privacy matters and our policies.

For instance, as you can see in the TOS section "Proprietary Rights in Content on Everpix Services", users fully own their photos and we do not claim any ownership rights. The only right we ask is the one to display your photos on our platform back to you and to users with whom you choose to share them with (kind of obvious but it doesn't hurt to say it). One last (edge) case is if you explicitly give us some of your photos to improve our science [2]. For such photos you are giving us some rights.

[1] https://www.everpix.com/legal/terms.html

[2] https://support.everpix.com/entries/23173576-Giving-copies-o...

[InclinedPlane]

I'm waiting for someone to do this sort of thing the right way by setting up an endowment or trust and legal instruments that can guarantee preservation of hosting (as much as possible) for at least a decade into the future.

[polarix]

Or provide an AMI?

[swiil]

Why not offer an export to S3 or Drop Box or Etc... feature so to avoid this fear? I agree - not going to pay unless some back up (locally or otherwise) option is offered to mitigate this risk.

[swisspol]

(Everpix founder here) Just to be clear, we certainly allow users to re-download photos in full-resolution and with all their metadata, but in batches from various places in www.everpix.com, not as a single gigantic multi-gigabytes ZIP archive (for technical reasons you can imagine but we are working on it).

[timmins]

Another competitor in this space, Trovebox.com, does exactly this.

[swisspol]

(Everpix founder here) Thanks for the kind words!

Note that in the case of Everpix, one of our key goal is that no manual organization be needed. Just keep taking photos the way you are used to, let stuff sync in the background and we'll take care of the rest.

You can't really spend time organizing albums which could turn out to be wasted time in the future, since we don't even have manual albums or a trash. The only time you can spend with Everpix is more time enjoying your photo collection ;)

[innonate]

Hey -- deet already gave some info about Picturelife I'd also mention this: You can use your own S3 account with Picturelife and never pay us a dime. If we disappeared one day, all your photos would still be on your S3 account and with our free API you could get all your metadata out in a way you (or someone) could still use our frontend to access them. ~innonate, co-founder of Picturelife

[viame]

+1 to this.

[fakeer]

>>what can I do?

Hosting your own gallery and deciding public-private-public-semi-lockdown must have occurred to you I reckon. And you can sure do that. Keep a back up all the time.

AAMOF if you've enough enough at your shared server or VPS then it will become another backup, in addition to local and remote( sth like backblaze, crashplan).

PS. I didn't use Snapjoy much but had few photos there. Just casually put over there after creating my a/c. It was some referral. I can't login now(it's alright) and the good old blog post link, is still there, in which they they promised our photos were safe they will get back to us. Did they?