We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. — Albert Einstein

It’s been a long time coming but today we’re excited to announce that the OpenPhoto for iPhone app is available in the Apple App Store.

Why is it awesome?
The vision behind The OpenPhoto Project is enormous but we know that we can only achieve it one step at a time. Having your OpenPhoto account in your pocket is one (particularly large) step in achieving our goals.

There’s something powerful in trying to build something for the common good. It means we play by different rules and analyze different metrics. But what’s achieved in the end is magnitudes larger than if you’re focus is elsewhere.

The app you see in the App Store is what we have available on Github. You’re free to fork or modify what we’ve built however you’d like. In fact we encourage it and happily accept pull requests.

But for now you should go download the app and start using it.

Credits
A huge thanks goes out to Tobias Beisel designing the app and Patrick Santana for making it work.

It’s sometimes difficult to convey the mission of The OpenPhoto Project. Sure we want to liberate people’s photos and give them complete ownership and control of their photos, comments and tags. That leads to the question, “so you’re building an alternative to Flickr?”.

Absolutely not. That’d be stupid.

If you, like us, believe Flickr is fundamentally flawed in how your photos enter and exit their system you too would build something radically different. And this doesn’t just apply to Flickr, it applies to everyone.

So there it is, we’re not building an alternative to Flickr. We’re building an entirely different way to think of how you organize and share your photos. Imagine being able to grant web and mobile applications access to your hard drive, which you ultimately hold the keys to. Now imagine that your hard drive is in the cloud, always available and professionally backed up.

That’s our vision and we hope others adopt it as well.

The recent shutdown of Gush reiterates all the reasons we started The OpenPhoto Project. For those unaware of Gush they were a photo service that collected all of your photos from your computer, Facebook and Flickr (source). They’re similar to recent services like Everpix and Snapjoy.

In an email to users, Gush thanks them for testing the service but states they are shutting it down immediately and deleting the photos this week.

Our thesis is that even if a service ceases to exist, you should still retain all of your data. This powerful decoupling of data storage and application logic is what sets OpenPhoto apart from every other photo service and it’s only the beginning.

We’re sorry. Getting handed a pink slip is always hard and especially hard if you loved your work. It’s no secret that Flickr is a labor of love for many of the folks working on it.

It’s also true that every closed door leads to unique opportunities so I’d like to extend an invitation to help us build The OpenPhoto Project. We’re over 35 people passionately working to create an amazing photo platform that puts users and community first.

You can find out more information at our website: http://theopenphotoproject.org or get in touch with me (Jaisen Mathai, ex-Yahoo!) personally at [email protected] or @jmathai.