[innonate]

Would love to hang next time I come out to SF area.

Custom S3 buckets are great for us because they don't cost us a lot to support, not many people ever want them (relative to the general public), but it allows us to do something awesome for the people who do want them.

I'm curious about your experience about supporting other storage options as well – we only do S3 because we know we can give a really high quality experience with them and it fits in nicely with all our processing steps. Complexity aside, I'd be concerned that something like Dropbox, for instance, woudl have high latency with their API and then make Picturelife seem slow.

[jmathai]

The way we dealt with that was for storage systems like Dropbox we store originals there but cache all of the thumbnails in an S3 bucket. It also didn't make sense to store thumbs in a user's Dropbox account.

All in all we treated every storage system independently but it was easy for us because that was the design from the beginning.

Even in our case the vast majority of consumers use storage we provided. We even support migration between storage services and that got some good use but nothing of any significant scale.

Drop me a note when you're in the Bay Area. @jmathai on Twitter or contact info in profile.