Today we released the upcoming version of OpenPhoto at our hosted service, now named Trovebox.

We spent a lot of time asking you and ourselves what could make OpenPhoto better. The result is a completely revamped user interface and experience.

Sharing photos
We took our first of many steps towards making sharing your photos easy for you and for those you share with. You’ll notice a share icon next to every photo. Clicking it will display 3 options to share your photos.

Share via email
The simplest way is to share via email. Doing this attaches a low resolution photo to the recipient(s). Your photos can be public or private and the recipients won’t have to click a link, login or sign up for a service to view your photo.

Share via Twitter and Facebook
Of course there are times when you want to post a photo to your Twitter or Facebook. Those options are just a click away on the right. You’ll want to make sure the photo you’re sharing is public.

Managing your photos
We wanted to make it effortless to change the title of a photo, make it private or add it to an album. You’ll notice nearly everything can be updated by simply clicking on it.

Just look for the pencil icon and get clicking.

Batch editing your photos
The pushpin is your key to edit photos in batch. You can select all the photos from the sub navigation or selectively click on the pusphin  when you hover over a photo. This adds it to a queue from where you can add tags, albums or change the privacy.

Revamped iPhone and Android apps
We’ve also updated our apps in the app stores. You’ll find all of the same functionality which was there before but with a cleaner and sleeker look.

The team
There were a lot of people who helped make this release possible.

• Tobias Beisel, iPhone and Android UI and design
• John Fabrizio, web UI and design
• Mark Fabrizio, web UI and interaction
• Patrick Santana, iPhone development
• Eugene Popovich, Android development
• Jaisen Mathai, API and backend

And as always the entire community for opening issues, pull requests and keeping us motivated.

Don’t forget to take a moment to set down your cameras and turn off your phones during the holiday season. Take some time to appreciate your family and friends, the scenery around you and all the little things you have to be thankful for in 2012.

Here’s to 2013. It’s going to be a great year!

TL;DR

PixelPipe adds support for hosted and self installed OpenPhoto instances bringing the power of the pi.pe platform to anyone who wants to migrate, transfer, share, manage and retain control of their photos.

For example, if you would like to migrate your entire 500px account over to Amazon S3 and use the OpenPhoto web and mobile apps to view, share and manage your photos - it’s now possible with a few clicks.

Head over to http://pi.pe to get started.

PixelPipe’s support for OpenPhoto puts the power of their pi.pe platform in the hands of anyone who wants to leverage it. — Jaisen Mathai, The OpenPhoto Project

PixelPipe recently launched (experimental) support for OpenPhoto. PixelPipe is a service that allows you to transfer photos (and videos) across social sites. If you have 5,000 photos in Facebook you’d like moved over to 500px; they do that. PixelPipe supports over 10 services.

Freedom is a possession of inestimable value. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Our goals with The OpenPhoto Project are to provide tools which make it easy for users to retain ownership and control of their photos. So the combination of PixelPipe and OpenPhoto create some very unique opportunities for users and developers.

OpenPhoto support in PixelPipe is unique for 2 reasons. It’s both distributed and open source. Every OpenPhoto instance is supported. Ones at openphoto.me and self hosted versions.

There exist 73 combination you can play with.

OpenPhoto supports the following storage services:

• Dropbox
• Box.com
• CX
• Amazon S3
• DreamObjects
• Local filesystem (for self installed instances)

PixelPipe supports these services:

• 500px
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Google Drive
• Instagram
• Mixi
• MySpace
• OpenPhoto
• PhotoBucket
• Picasa
• Shutterfly
• Smugmug

On being distributed
Being distributed means that you can set OpenPhoto up yourself, on your own hardware, and point the PixelPipe service to it.

On being open source
Being open source means you can configure it to do whatever you’d like.

Or you can use webhooks without touching a line of code.

We’d love to know what you think. Drop us an email (openphoto@googlegroups.com) or send us a message on Twitter (@openphoto).

As of today, OpenPhoto supports 5 cloud storage providers including Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3, CX and DreamObjects. Until now that simply meant you could choose where your photos get stored.

Our vision, however, is much larger than that. We’ve been working on and testing the ability to easily switch between cloud storage providers. If you put 10,000 photos into Box then they shouldn’t be stuck there. You should be able to click a button, go watch a movie and come back to every photo now in Dropbox.

Your website, iPhone and Android apps shouldn’t know anything happened and the next photo you take should end up in Dropbox instead of Box. Every title, tag, album and comment should remain in tact.

What we’re working toward can be summed up in a single word: seamless.

It doesn’t happen overnight but this is a big step towards putting you in control of your photos.

Let us know what you think via Twitter, Facebook or email.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. – Peter Drucker

The OpenPhoto Project was born out of a desire to provide tools to enable users to capture, organize, share and enjoy their photos without giving up any ownership and control. We started in July of 2011 and one year later have lots of watchers on Github, a web application you can install yourself or sign up to use and apps for mobile devices.

The intention of OpenPhoto has always been to have mainstream appeal. That’s not easy to do when you’re building everything as open source software. In the past year we’ve had a lot of ups and a lot of downs but we’ve remained focused on the original vision.

The Shuttleworth Foundation
Today we’re excited to announce that Jaisen was awarded a fellowship from The Shuttleworth Foundation. Excited is actually an understatement.

The fellowship will allow us to dedicate much needed resources to OpenPhoto and continue focusing on building out the vision we set out on over a year ago. There’s still a lot left to do and we’ll be blogging and tweeting about our plans and progress.

Thanks - The OpenPhoto Team

When we started to send invites to let you import your entire Flickr library into OpenPhoto we didn’t know exactly what to expect. Well, except that we’d need to handle transferring tens of thousands of photos at a time. As with most things we hand to our users we’re pleasantly surprised how they derive value in ways we didn’t consider.

Many of our users link their OpenPhoto account to their Dropbox account. This means all of the photos they put into OpenPhoto actually get stored in their Dropbox. Pretty nifty. Pair that with an import tool from Flickr and you essentially have the ability to easily download many years worth of photos to your computer. Really nifty.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. Now what you have is a system that lets you do everything you wanted with those photos while keeping them in your Dropbox.

A beautiful web interface
There’s a reason you don’t get a lot of links to view someone’s photos on Dropbox. It’s a pretty clunky experience. They do tons of things great but having a really great viewing experience for photos isn’t one of them. Here’s an example.

The pocket sized version
Our iPhone app takes all of this and puts it right in your pocket. Capture, view or share your photos via email, Facebook or Twitter.

Organize using tags and albums
Remember all the tags and sets you created on Flickr? We make sure all of that information is preserved. You can still view and share your photos the way you did using Flickr. This sort of makes storing your photos in your Dropbox, well, sane.

Dropbox and beyond
We love using Dropbox as an example since so many consumers are familiar with it. But we provide our own storage or you can use your Amazon S3 bucket. It’s trivial to add support for Box and Google Drive, we’ve been a tad busy though! Our vision is to let you choose where you want to entrust your photos and give you the option of changing your mind at any time. All without ever having to think about switching photo services.

Want to import your photos to OpenPhoto?
Sign up and get an invite to import your photos from Flickr, Facebook or Instagram.