Yahoo Engineer Leaves to Build an Open Flickr Alternative

OpenPhoto is a new “open” alternative to Flickr being built by programmer Jaisen Mathai — an engineer who quit his job at Yahoo (Flickr’s owner) back in May 2011. Instead of storing images using company servers, this new service will allow users to connect their own online storage accounts to store their data within arms reach. This would be like using Flickr to share your images while having the photos themselves be stored in a location that you control (e.g. Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc…).

Mathai is planning to have an open source version of the software that anyone can install on their own servers, and also a hosted version of the software, much like Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com for blogging. He’s currently raising money for the project through Kickstarter, and plans to launch the hosted version of the service by September.

Discussion