Just backed this project on Kickstarter. Can’t believe Amazon and Dropbox haven’t.

Love that he’s involving designers.

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Kickstarter - OpenPhoto, a photo service for your S3 or Dropbox account

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

The Deliverables

Build a top notch photo sharing service that stores photos, tags and comments into a users cloud service account (i.e. Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloudfiles or Dropbox)
Provide two versions of the service, both free - installable and hosted
Allow photos to be easily uploaded, searchable and shared via Email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Document the crap out of it so others can build their own OpenPhoto applications
Open source the installable version on Github

I can’t promise the following deliverables but if we can get some additional pledges I would commit to do the following.

Mobile application for iPhone and Android
A marketplace for designers to create their own themes for free or paid
A community based feature request voting system
AMIs for easy setup on EC2
Many more…

The Method

I just left my job as an engineer at Yahoo! to persue this project. I’ll be spending countless hours at the Hacker Dojo to build OpenPhoto.

I’ve been building web applications for over a decade and previously co-founded a photo sharing service I still use myself. Over the last 8 years I’ve learned a great deal about online photo sharing services so I’ll be building the majority of this myself. I will, however, work with some awesome designers to make sure that the site looks and functions great.

Why $25,000

A portion of the money will be used to pay bills since I’m not getting my cushy paycheck from Yahoo! anymore. There are also various other expenses such as design work, space at the Hacker Dojo and lots of peanut butter, jelly and bread.

In reality this venture will cost more than $25,000 but it sounded like a good starting point. This is an ambitious project that compares to photo sharing startups who raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. $25,000 is the first of many steps. But it’s the most important step and you all rock for making it happen.

The Dates

July/August
The installable source code to run your own OpenPhoto site. This will bedownloadable from Github.

September
A hosted version of OpenPhoto where anyone can sign up for an account. You can always switch from an installed version to the hosted version and back whenever you want. Your data is made completely portable by the OpenPhoto system.

Join me in setting everyone’s photos free!

You can fork the project on Github or follow us on Twitter.