This idea has been stirring in my head for several months but today in the car I realized the vision in full.

TLDR; If I build a photo sharing service based on Amazon S3 (and CloudFront) would you pay to use it? You'd upload photos through the service into your own Amazon S3 bucket - meaning you have 100% control over the photos. Low resolution copies (for sharing) will be stored on your CloudFront distribution.

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The details

The state of photo sharing is absolutely horrible. Most people upload photos to Facebook and I won't even go into the 1001 reasons why their photo service is abysmal. Some use Picassa or Flickr, while better than Facebook they still control the destiny of your photos. Flickr's got APIs - so that's a start but it's not trivial to get all your photos and their meta data (comments, tags, etc).

What I'm envisioning is a frontend for YOUR photo collection that resides in an Amazon S3 bucket you own. A good interface to upload photos, share them, and control privacy. The whole point of this is to be open and let you retain ownership of your photos.

Lots of potential features on the roadmap but what I described is phase I.

My guess is the cost would be in the $1-2 / month range + any S3 costs you'd incur yourself. I'm hosting about 18 GB of photos and it costs me around $2 / month.

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The team (me)

Who the heck is this dude and what are his qualifications? My website is at http://www.jaisenmathai.com. I was a co-founder of a photo sharing startup back in 2004. We shut down shop in 2007 but you can see it here: http://photos.jaisenmathai.com/users/jmathai/photos/tags-tavin,favorites/.

I'm pretty positive I can build the first version of this out in a couple weeks (with a basic UI).<p>If you're a graphic artist and want to provide ongoing design services then you can have an account for free :).

user:	alexchu
created:	January 24, 2011
karma:	11
about:	http://alexchu.cghub.com/images/ Guilty of crushing the console world with the Halo team. Now planning on doing it again in the mobile world. I make games with passion.