Agreed. Flickr is $25 for unlimited storage. That's much better than S3 AFAIK. Especially in this day and age when I go out with my DSLR and come back with 4gig of new images.
Here's one datapoint: I have 652,082 images in my account, and have downloaded my entire library a number of times using different 3rd party utilities. Haven't ever had an issue.
> Also, good luck dowloading your whole photo collection from Flickr.
I periodically fire up an EC2 instance and do just that via the API.
> It may say unlimited, but only a fool would believe it. How many photos do you have uploaded anyway?
Unlike your average "unlimited" shared web hosting, I've yet to hear of a single person booted off Flickr for uploading too much (legit) stuff. Storage is cheap, and the folks paying $25 to upload a photo a month likely subsidize the really heavy users a little.
In theory, yes. But there are a plentiful of Flickr users who grudgingly renew their Flickr account because they don't see any alternatives that includes porting their photos.
The solutions exist. But no one knows about them. I believe this is a big problem and we're baking data portability right into the service.
If Flickr had a big button that said, export all of your photos then I imagine people would.
And by export I don't mean download zip file. I mean move where your photos are stored without losing the benefits of having them "up in the cloud".
I don't know that it has to defeat every proprietary system in order to be successful and it doesn't happen over night. I can tell you that from what our customers are saying that the value proposition is becoming extremely clear. It's been challenging because the concepts aren't always easy to explain. But as with any model that's drastically different it takes time for folks to warm up to it. That was always the biggest hurdle. But I can say that it is happening in a real and measurable way.
You don't even need a Dropbox account. You can use storage provided by the hosted solution at Whig point is is like Flickr or Picasa with the exception that you can easily migrate the location of your photos without any disruption.
That is most likely the reason this, as many other "open" alternatives, won't defeat proprietary solutions.
A normal human being won't bother setting up an S3 account and integrating with this service when they can just pay Flickr/Picasa and forget.