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Frequently asked questions
This is a list of common questions that people have about The OpenPhoto Project. If you have one which is not on this list send us a message via Twitter or email.
What exactly is OpenPhoto?
tl;dr Dropbox for your photos
OpenPhoto lets you aggregate, archive, organize your photos using your personal cloud accounts such as Dropbox or Amazon S3.
Aggregate
OpenPhoto import tools help you rescue your photos from 3rd party services (including OpenPhoto itself). Easily and seamlessly import your photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook or Smugmug.
Archive
By using OpenPhoto all of your photos are being stored into your storage accounts. This means they're archived for good. It's the master shoebox for all of your photos and you can relax that it'll always be available to you.
Organize
OpenPhoto automatically does some organization of your photos by date and location. You can add additional organization by adding tags to your photos or putting them into folders.
What makes OpenPhoto different from Flickr, Smugmug, iCloud or any other service?
Normally you pay one company to store your photos and to provide services to share them. This means that you can't do much if they raise their prices, shut down their service or another site comes along.
These sites may offer APIs but it's often limited what you can do with their API. Your photos are still stored on the company's servers who provide the base service.
With OpenPhoto you can switch between services, use more than one at a time or stop using the service without losing a single photo.
If OpenPhoto is open sourced then why isn't it free?
All of the source for OpenPhoto is available on Github. This includes the web application, mobile apps and plugins for Wordpress just to name a few. We've also got lots of guides to help you get started.
If you'd rather not install the software yourself you can sign up for a hosted account. The hosted account may or may not be free depending on the service and what features you use.
How much does the storage cost?
It depends on what you use but here are some base prices from Amazon.
- 20GB of storage on Amazon S3 costs ≈$2/mo
- A 250KB photo served up 4,000 times on Amazon S3 costs ≈$.10/mo
- A simpleDb database for a personal account is typically free