When I considered starting my own company in the photo sharing/storage I did some research of the field. Ignoring the my business related conclusions, there is one thing I learned as a consumer:
-- You shouldn't trust your photos with these companies --
People store photos to last for long long time while most of these companies' lifespan is much shorter. The best outcome would be spending time, money and nerves on porting data from place to place.
I hate saying this but I'd go with established companies that either have a sustainable business model around photos/storage (Amazon, Dropbox, Apple) or have deep enough pockets to make up for it (Microsoft, Google). I probably forgot some but you get the idea.
Personally I find a couple of hard drives in raid at home the most reliable photo backup strategy. It doesn't protect them from natural disasters, but these are much less likely than a cloud service being bought/sunsetted. I can not even trust Google Photos because since it's not Google's core product I have to assume they can decide to discontinue it overnight any time.
It could be a good solution but for me the overhead is too high and it lacks many of the benefits of having the data in the cloud. + what happens when there is a disaster, the insurance doesn't cover lost memories.
Specifically about Google, I agree that Google+ Photos (or however this is called) is a strange beast. But it shares storage with Google Drive and in fact Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos. So I use only Google Drive folders for backup. I also believe that in case Google (or any other company of that scale) chooses to shut down a major service it will give a fair notice (don't forget it has business users as well). As for Apple, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, MS... it seems like a core product.
At this point, no photo storing company is reliable. It might actually be a competitive advantage to form some sort of photo sharing company that has legally committed to not letting a big guy buy them and shut down their service like this. Of course, then you have the other side where they often die due to lack of hosting funds. So you'd have to charge a lot and legally require it be put into a fund that only pays for hosting or something. Tough business problem, but wanting hosting is common and not wanting Google to come blow the service away is becoming common too...
Photo sharing is awesome and all, but what about photo organization and backup? I'd like a service/program that takes my "gold" copy of my photos with metadata off my external drive and keeps my albums on Picasa/+ and Flickr in sync.
+1. I can't believe it but I'm having to roll my own photo/video database in 2015. Mostly it's because having Android/IOS/classic cameras is hard to handle with any one photo indexer, and because they are not always complete e.g. I don't see a way in iTunes to pull down media that came in on mms messages.
I have spent the last week trying to work through this issue.
What I came up with was gold copy on an external drive that I manipulate with the Windows version of Picasa. I use it to add tags, geo info and clean up pics. I enable the Sync to Web feature, which keeps Google+/Picasa Web up to date.
To ensure the copy on Flickr is up to date I registered a program called PhotoSync for Flickr that watches folders for changes and uploads pics. This is still a manual process to set up for the most part since it requires a clean sync; I have to delete all Flickr albums and reupload.
I thought I had the solution with PICBACKMAN, which costs $49 a year. It didn't handle the meta data for the photos when syncing with Google+/Picasa Web nor did it dedupe when uploading an album. For instance, I add a new pic to a folder it would upload all the other pics again.
So, to answer your question. My photos are very important to me and I have spent a great deal of time scanning pre-digital ones into the archive. I'd pay $100 a year to ensure my gold copy was synced among services with all meta data included.
Like other many other apps, Odysee was built around a freemium model: free for the first year, and then $5/year thereafter. The founders had at one point estimated that they could keep the business sustainable if they reached 3 million users.
How hard would it be to get 3 million people to sign up for something at $5 a year? I imagine that at that point you might as well charge $5 a month or something, since the fixed cost of getting a person to pull out their credit card is so high
Might as well make it 20 or 50 per month. Or, scrap the idea of trying to get 3 million at 5/year (after a year's cliff, which is wishful thinking that your app will even be relevant in the market of next year). Instead, get 2500 at 500 in a slice of the market that's actually willing to pay for value (like enterprise). Cut your expenditures to a third by shedding the people who don't live and breathe this thing and you only need a thousand customers to be sustainable. That's within the ballpark of sanity. But no. Instead it's "freemium".
Honestly, these days when I hear "freemium" I mentally translate it to "aquihire resume with a lottery ticket". Not that there's anything wrong with that.
At this point it's just a matter of time before exposure.co gets acquired. I thought photo sharing and the like services were out of fashion but they are still being bought up in bushes. There's really a monopoly battle going on for the final answer to the question "Where will I store my photos, online?".
On 1TB external USB drive. I gave up on all online services when I moved to new computer. Sure it is not convenient, but I dont have to worry about my relationship to any online service anymore. It is all local, all near.
What do you plan to do when it breaks down? One of the nicest features of these services is the fact it's backed up very well, usually in multiple copies and locations.
I don't know what @webwanderings does to backup the external drive, but most cloud backup providers give you the option of backing up external drives (in addition to the internal ones).
you might consider storing in amazon s3 ..its highly durable and cheap and wont suffer from local hdd failure. it probably wont be sold in the near future.
For the sake of completion, do both. A NAS box with a S3 or Glacier backup routine will do it.
Now, I'm on the cheap side, but I find AWS expensive compared to other backup services like backblaze. Perhaps it's the backup services that are overly cheap, I don't know, but I'd love to have a cheaper service available for backing up from a NAS (backblaze seems to be pain to setup on a NAS). I'd be OK with major inconvenience on retreaval, as long as it's cheap to backup.
Now, I'm on the cheap side, but I find AWS expensive compared to other backup services like backblaze. Perhaps it's the backup services that are overly cheap, I don't know, but I'd love to have a cheaper service available for backing up from a NAS (backblaze seems to be pain to setup on a NAS). I'd be OK with major inconvenience on retreaval, as long as it's cheap to backup.
Glacier is $10/month for 1TB. For highly durable long-term storage, that is stupid cheap.
I'm happy for the team but somewhat sad for the users. I wonder why they sold so quick? Google is the antithesis of using edge devices to their maximal advantage, and this was clearly not a product acquisition.
It is very annoying when a startup gets bought like this and shuts down its service in a matter of weeks. If all my photos were there and they'd just down I'd be very annoyed.
I get that they don't care about public opinion now - but it's still very frustrating when this sort of thing happens. It wouldn't kill them to stay open and close registration and then offer automatic migration to the service once it's integrated into Google - the user base gets preserved this way which is another win.
Comments
When I considered starting my own company in the photo sharing/storage I did some research of the field. Ignoring the my business related conclusions, there is one thing I learned as a consumer:
-- You shouldn't trust your photos with these companies --
People store photos to last for long long time while most of these companies' lifespan is much shorter. The best outcome would be spending time, money and nerves on porting data from place to place.
I hate saying this but I'd go with established companies that either have a sustainable business model around photos/storage (Amazon, Dropbox, Apple) or have deep enough pockets to make up for it (Microsoft, Google). I probably forgot some but you get the idea.
Personally I find a couple of hard drives in raid at home the most reliable photo backup strategy. It doesn't protect them from natural disasters, but these are much less likely than a cloud service being bought/sunsetted. I can not even trust Google Photos because since it's not Google's core product I have to assume they can decide to discontinue it overnight any time.
It could be a good solution but for me the overhead is too high and it lacks many of the benefits of having the data in the cloud. + what happens when there is a disaster, the insurance doesn't cover lost memories.
Specifically about Google, I agree that Google+ Photos (or however this is called) is a strange beast. But it shares storage with Google Drive and in fact Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos. So I use only Google Drive folders for backup. I also believe that in case Google (or any other company of that scale) chooses to shut down a major service it will give a fair notice (don't forget it has business users as well). As for Apple, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, MS... it seems like a core product.
Not really.
Only one way, read only. If you want to make changes like autoawesome or using the editor, you need to copy the album to G+.
The Internet Archive should offer this as a service to help fund their other operations.
Just pay $10/month and dump them in your 1TB DropBox account?
At this point, no photo storing company is reliable. It might actually be a competitive advantage to form some sort of photo sharing company that has legally committed to not letting a big guy buy them and shut down their service like this. Of course, then you have the other side where they often die due to lack of hosting funds. So you'd have to charge a lot and legally require it be put into a fund that only pays for hosting or something. Tough business problem, but wanting hosting is common and not wanting Google to come blow the service away is becoming common too...
Photo sharing is awesome and all, but what about photo organization and backup? I'd like a service/program that takes my "gold" copy of my photos with metadata off my external drive and keeps my albums on Picasa/+ and Flickr in sync.
Is there such a service/program that does this?
+1. I can't believe it but I'm having to roll my own photo/video database in 2015. Mostly it's because having Android/IOS/classic cameras is hard to handle with any one photo indexer, and because they are not always complete e.g. I don't see a way in iTunes to pull down media that came in on mms messages.
Google+ does that: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2013/09/25/raw-photos-in-the-c...
How much would you pay for such a service?
Good question.
I have spent the last week trying to work through this issue.
What I came up with was gold copy on an external drive that I manipulate with the Windows version of Picasa. I use it to add tags, geo info and clean up pics. I enable the Sync to Web feature, which keeps Google+/Picasa Web up to date.
To ensure the copy on Flickr is up to date I registered a program called PhotoSync for Flickr that watches folders for changes and uploads pics. This is still a manual process to set up for the most part since it requires a clean sync; I have to delete all Flickr albums and reupload.
I thought I had the solution with PICBACKMAN, which costs $49 a year. It didn't handle the meta data for the photos when syncing with Google+/Picasa Web nor did it dedupe when uploading an album. For instance, I add a new pic to a folder it would upload all the other pics again.
So, to answer your question. My photos are very important to me and I have spent a great deal of time scanning pre-digital ones into the archive. I'd pay $100 a year to ensure my gold copy was synced among services with all meta data included.
How hard would it be to get 3 million people to sign up for something at $5 a year? I imagine that at that point you might as well charge $5 a month or something, since the fixed cost of getting a person to pull out their credit card is so high
Might as well make it 20 or 50 per month. Or, scrap the idea of trying to get 3 million at 5/year (after a year's cliff, which is wishful thinking that your app will even be relevant in the market of next year). Instead, get 2500 at 500 in a slice of the market that's actually willing to pay for value (like enterprise). Cut your expenditures to a third by shedding the people who don't live and breathe this thing and you only need a thousand customers to be sustainable. That's within the ballpark of sanity. But no. Instead it's "freemium".
Honestly, these days when I hear "freemium" I mentally translate it to "aquihire resume with a lottery ticket". Not that there's anything wrong with that.
At this point it's just a matter of time before exposure.co gets acquired. I thought photo sharing and the like services were out of fashion but they are still being bought up in bushes. There's really a monopoly battle going on for the final answer to the question "Where will I store my photos, online?".
On 1TB external USB drive. I gave up on all online services when I moved to new computer. Sure it is not convenient, but I dont have to worry about my relationship to any online service anymore. It is all local, all near.
What do you plan to do when it breaks down? One of the nicest features of these services is the fact it's backed up very well, usually in multiple copies and locations.
I don't know what @webwanderings does to backup the external drive, but most cloud backup providers give you the option of backing up external drives (in addition to the internal ones).
you might consider storing in amazon s3 ..its highly durable and cheap and wont suffer from local hdd failure. it probably wont be sold in the near future.
For the sake of completion, do both. A NAS box with a S3 or Glacier backup routine will do it.
Now, I'm on the cheap side, but I find AWS expensive compared to other backup services like backblaze. Perhaps it's the backup services that are overly cheap, I don't know, but I'd love to have a cheaper service available for backing up from a NAS (backblaze seems to be pain to setup on a NAS). I'd be OK with major inconvenience on retreaval, as long as it's cheap to backup.
Glacier is $10/month for 1TB. For highly durable long-term storage, that is stupid cheap.
For reference, Backblaze is half that price for unlimited data.
you can do the same with Dropbox, and it automatically backs up your photos from plugged-in devices
I'm happy for the team but somewhat sad for the users. I wonder why they sold so quick? Google is the antithesis of using edge devices to their maximal advantage, and this was clearly not a product acquisition.
It is very annoying when a startup gets bought like this and shuts down its service in a matter of weeks. If all my photos were there and they'd just down I'd be very annoyed.
I get that they don't care about public opinion now - but it's still very frustrating when this sort of thing happens. It wouldn't kill them to stay open and close registration and then offer automatic migration to the service once it's integrated into Google - the user base gets preserved this way which is another win.
I always backup my private anal wards photos to the cloud ... Damn Im old, I just cant understand new generation :(