Posted on 29/07/2013. By Pete Otaqui.
Open Shutter – a web service for collating your photos and albums across all other major photo storage services.
NB – this is all just an idea, and not entirely original. However I don’t know of any service available at the time of writing that offers exactly these features, which are a set that would really suit me right now!
The amusingly-named Open Shutter (or “OS”) uses social authentication to view and analyze all your pictures across many platforms: facebook, flickr, instagram, google+, dropbox, etc. The service takes meta data from the source pictures and allows you to easily reorganize them in its own interface – by date, album, location, third-party service, etc.
OS is clever and will take a reasonably sized copy of the original images to use for organisation purposes, while always allowing you to quickly get to the original. You can optionally buy more storage and then import the originals directly into OS, allowing it to become the real go-to place for your online photography. The service also inspects “popularity” of images on other services (based on number of “Likes”, comments, etc) to make it even easier for you to curate the very best pictures you’ve taken.
You can also include pictures that your friends on other networks (like Facebook, flickr, etc) have taken – OS goes to considerable lengths here to work out if your friends pictures’ were taken were at the same time and place. There is also the ability to create one-off “group albums”, similar to Facebook and Google+ Events, where you and your friends can proactively choose which photographs to include in a set.
The goal of Open Shutter is to offer users a way of aggregating their pictures without locking them in to always using it. You’ve got an iPhone but your partner uses Android? No problem. Your phone pictures go on Google+ but you upload from your DSLR to flickr? Yep – we can handle that.
Open Shutter is the best way to collect and organise pictures from your phones, your cameras, and your friends.