Almost a year ago I asked if you would pay for a photo management and sharing service that allowed you to store your photos into your own Amazon S3 bucket. The overall response seemed to be NO.

A few months later in May I decided to leave my job at Yahoo! and pursue it full time anyway. Shortly after I launched it as a Kickstarter project[1] it ended up getting coverage on Techcrunch[2], RWW[3], and TNW[4]. I reached the goal of $25k on the last day of fundraising on Kickstarter.

In August we were the first project to be accepted into Mozilla's WebFWD program[5]. I say we because by this point there was a community helping build OpenPhoto. Did I mention it's 100% free and open source? That's pretty important.

What was originally pitched as a "Wordpress-like" photo service is now a full fledged photo management and photo sharing platform. The OpenPhoto API powers not only the web client but an Android and iOS client as well (not yet in the app store). I had originally thought it would take me 2 months to build but it's taken me and a team of volunteers 5 months.

What we've built is orders of magnitude beyond what I had originally envisioned and I think OpenPhoto stands a chance to actually disrupt the photo space by giving control and ownership of people's photos back to them.

To find out more about OpenPhoto go to http://theopenphotoproject.org

Here are a few invites:

  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zd065
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zd635
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zd92d
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdb3f
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdd72
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdde9
  * http://openphoto.me/?code=zdfbd

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/former-yahoo-engineer-quits-to-build-a-flickr-killer-on-kickstarter/

[3] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/save_your_photos_to_amazon_or_dropbox_with_app_pla.php

[4] http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/07/16/creating-a-portable-web-when-your-data-is-truly-yours/

[5] http://blog.webfwd.org/post/9300091721/webfwd-welcomes-the-first-fellows