IMHO the most important feature any service that I trust my most previous assets, my photos with, is the ease of which I can take my photos off.
I currently have around 60 gigs of photos that I am in desperate need for an easy solution for sharing and storage for. Even keeping it in the iPhoto folder format right now makes me dizzy for the future, but I havent found one service yet that meet me criteria. Most are great for sharing, but most of them depend on a certain lock-in effect. There is, as far as I can see, no easy way to move your photos very quickly from one host to another.
With snapjoy, it seems you are only able to download the images one by one.
Have a look at OpenPhoto (self installed or hosted, a la Wordpress). Lets you select where you want your photos to be stored (Dropbox, S3, etc) and provides web and mobile apps to access them. Also, completely open source[1].
Dropbox isn't really optimized for photos. It does a great job backing up and syncing across devices but that's about where it stops in relation to photos.
We provide a layer on top of Dropbox. You can better organize your photos using albums or tags. Metadata from your photos are automatically extracted (title, tags, geolocation). There's a proper photo API for creating and using additional apps. There's plenty more but the blog post[1] covers it well if you're curious or ping me :).
Under no circumstance will I keep photos natively in the iPhoto application/folder. What I do is go to the advanced tab in iPhoto and tell iPhoto NOT to pull a copy into it's directory. Simply unload your photos into the filesystem somewhere and drop that folder in iPhoto. Keeping your photos beholden to iPhoto is just asking for trouble.
The way I look at it is that photos equal files and files should be in folders accessible via a simple file manager. iPhoto subverts that model turning it on its head and makes your photos beholden to it by burying them within its internal structure. iTunes does a similar thing to music files.
It is clear that Apple is attempting to abstract away user control over their digital assets by giving that control to their applications.
Ah. OK. Personally, I care about my photos and music; the files are incidental to the content. Both iTunes and iPhoto (or Aperture, in my case) privilege the content over the file structure, and to my way of thinking, that's correct behaviour. Of course, to each their own.
I agree and wish I had not done that. But before I go through all the hassle and export everything, I want to make to make sure not to run into the exact same problem again.
I'm in the same boat as nchuhoai, but I now have over 500GB of photos and videos to worry about (get a DSLR and some photogenic kids, and you'll see how quickly the GBs add up, even after heavy editing/deletion).
With DSLRs becoming more popular, and HD-quality video becoming more mainstream, I suspect that storing, sharing, and backing up these memories will become a much bigger concern for many people. Snapjoy's pricing page currently maxes out at 155GB @ $15/month, so that's clearly not going to cut it.
I use Picasa to manage all the photos/videos, and used to actually pay Google $100/year for 400GB of storage, until they increased it to $19.99/mo (2.4x more) and started to creepily over-share private photos on Google+. I also used to pay Mozy to back everything up, until they removed their unlimited plan and asked me to pay over $70/month for the data I already had there. If I choose to go with iCloud keep all my HD originals, I'll be paying at least $1200 per year.
I still haven't been able to find just one service to fit my needs. I've been using Facebook to share low-res photos, KickSend to send hi-res originals to specific people, and CrashPlan to back everything up both offline (to an ioSafe drive) and to their cloud (which still has an unlimited option).
Really hoping someone really cracks this nut and offers a compelling service where "overage" charges are in the TB range. Though I would bet that Apple, Microsoft, etc are hoping that folks get used to these storage prices to the point where people are as used to paying them as their cable TV bill.
If you use OpenPhoto and use your own S3 bucket then you basically have a backup and sharing service in one. For 500GB you're probably cheaper than whatever iCloud is costing you plus you have similar if not better tools to manage and share your photos.
Edit: I'm not trying to hijack this Snapjoy thread btw :)
Oh, I just meant in terms of what iCloud charges it's about 1/2.
ATM 500GB is a pretty large in terms of options for consumer storage. Good thing is that the prices should continually go down. Bad thing is you'll continually be accruing more and more photos :).
It's a great question though. That 500GB of photos has some real value to you. I wonder what that is. And what the risk of losing it by backing up at home vs S3 vs home + S3.
I've followed snapjoy since they first came out, one of my favorite YC companies. They'd been radio silent for quite some time and I was afraid they'd faded away, so this is great news.
Now if they can get facial recognition and geotagging options working, they will replace iPhoto for me.
I currently have around 60 gigs of photos that I am in desperate need for an easy solution for sharing and storage for. Even keeping it in the iPhoto folder format right now makes me dizzy for the future, but I havent found one service yet that meet me criteria. Most are great for sharing, but most of them depend on a certain lock-in effect. There is, as far as I can see, no easy way to move your photos very quickly from one host to another.
With snapjoy, it seems you are only able to download the images one by one.