This is pretty interesting to me as I've been spending the last month preparing my soon-to-be startup; (hopefully) a competitor to Flickr/500px: https://photographer.io
Obviously I can't compete with that free space which they're giving out. Instead I'm going to stick to a lesser free plan and a sensible subscription price, and hope that people realise that I actually aim to make a profitable business out of it and stick around for a good long while.
If anyone's interested I'd be grateful for any/all feedback, or any questions about what Photographer.io can offer over Flickr. Obviously it's still in beta, but I figure I should probably let people know that it exists.
EDIT: If you tried to sign up, I apologise if it was broken. I pushed a fix for something else a few hours ago and managed to break the sign up form (clearly it needs better testing). The patch is going up now, and you should be able to sign up again shortly.
I'm 2 years into a photo service and disk space has never been the determining cost factor. Space is only used to get users to upgrade to a paying account. I don't downplay the importance of that though, it's critical to figure out how you're going to make money today and not once you have a few million users.
In Yahoo!'s case it's about getting more engagement and users.
I'm hoping to offer a bunch of features other than unlimited photo uploads to entice users into subscriptions. More features, such as being able to share private collections (albums/sets) with others, or increased control over what they see on the site.
I'm looking to launch it proper in the next couple of weeks once I have the TOS finalised and the company set up. And I'm always open to any suggestions users have for features they'd like to see :)
Please, have a plugin for the major photo packages (Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto, etc). Making it easy to get the images into your site lowers the barrier dramatically.
I stick with flickr because I use Aperture. It can export directly to my flickr account and means I have one less headache.
These are definitely on the horizon. This is one of the things that has been on my to-do list from the start. I did look into how the integrations work, IIRC Lightroom was pretty straightforward, but I assume Aperture can't be that much more tricky :)
Photo import is something I want to offer, but I need to make sure it doesn't break the terms of service of the other sites before I add it :)
I'm working out the subscription cost at the moment; I'm currently thinking around £25 per year. Does that sound reasonable? I'll very likely offer a discount to any beta users who upgrade within the first month or so too, as I'm really grateful for any and all feedback.
Doh, I feel like a pillock now - didn't realise Dean was talking about openphoto.
I've not seen it before; it's a great idea. I haven't got an API yet (but it will be coming soon after beta) and I'm all about freedom of data and information, so if you fancied supporting Photographer.io as another data source in the future I'd be more than happy to help.
I've worked a bit with Flickr's API in the past and found it very reasonable, so hopefully adding support for importing from there shouldn't be too tricky.
The reason I would want to sign up a photo sharing service is to be able to display them online and also have them backed up at the same time. I am notorious at the backing up part. Guarantee me these 2 things and I'll be your paying customer.
Edit: Right now I don't find the Ad Free account attractive, just saying. If anyone can have the same storage, what is flickr selling?
Backups are interesting, and something I had considered as a primary feature of the site. However this site is (currently) just me, and I don't feel that I could wholeheartedly say that a backup system relying on a single person is a good idea :) (unless that person is cperciva, in which case it's a-ok!)
Obviously I'm not expecting photos uploaded to the site to disappear at any moment (they're all on S3 anyway), but I'm not confident enough in the system yet to be able to offer anything like that, unfortunately.
It seems like not many services want to be the full RAW backup service that also does easy photo sharing. As in press a button and get a zip file of the gallery type of photo sharing that you get with G+. You do
You have 3 tiers:
1. RAW backups
2. Full JPEG renders downloadable in a zip file
3. Smaller JPEGs for online slideshows and viewing.
Obviously I can't compete with that free space which they're giving out. Instead I'm going to stick to a lesser free plan and a sensible subscription price, and hope that people realise that I actually aim to make a profitable business out of it and stick around for a good long while.
If anyone's interested I'd be grateful for any/all feedback, or any questions about what Photographer.io can offer over Flickr. Obviously it's still in beta, but I figure I should probably let people know that it exists.
EDIT: If you tried to sign up, I apologise if it was broken. I pushed a fix for something else a few hours ago and managed to break the sign up form (clearly it needs better testing). The patch is going up now, and you should be able to sign up again shortly.