ZangZing Photos Hostage

ZangZing Photos Hostage
The New ZangZing Will Never Keep Your Photos Hostage | TechCrunch
@John Rampton
Didn't they all start this way though?
@Kevin Hornschemeier
It's never mentioned how they are solving the problem of keeping your photos from "being held hostage". Seems like this is just another photo sharing app with more granular privacy settings. OpenPhoto was mentioned as just another photo sharing app, but it's actually solving the hostage problem.
@Richa Misra
You can download individual photos from your or you can download your albums just by a click of button. You can delete individual photos or you could delete whole album. You can even specify users other than yourself who could download your photos. So I am not quite sure what you mean by 'being held hostage'.
@Kevin Hornschemeier
Richa Misra Those weren't my words but words taken directly from the article which seemed to imply that users felt their photos were being held hostage (elsewhere) and that ZangZing was solving that - presumably with a new approach. Yet everything mentioned in the article, and everything you mentioned, has already been available. Being able to download your photos is not new and not the best solution as you lose other metadata such as the comments on your photos. I did mention that OpenPhoto was actually trying to solve this problem with a better approach. With every other service if you ever wanted to change providers, have a local backup, or the service went under you'd have to download your photos, which can be very time consuming and causes you to lose valuable metadata such as comments and tags, because your photos are stored on the service's storage. With OpenPhoto all of your photos are stored on your cloud storage so you always have control over who can access your photos, you don't lose your comments and tags, and you never have to download all your photos again because you own the storage they reside on. You can easily create backups or switch service providers without having to download and re-upload all of your photos. You get to keep all your photos in one place with a storage solution that you control.
@Martin Crampton
I tht this might solve the G+ / Picasa disconnect where I can't get pictures into MY OWN puter files without pain! Aren't they just another external storage system?
@Jaisen Mathai
Have a look at http://theopenphotoproject.org.
@Phil Beisel
ZangZing is pretty awesome. Period.
@Andrew Steele
Nice!
@Jaisen Mathai
I'm the founder of The OpenPhoto Project which was mentioned in this article. The author of this post, unfortunately, misunderstands how sites hold your photos hostage. And by misunderstand I really mean "does not at all understand". The core of OpenPhoto is the liberate people's photos and not "hold them hostage". In fact, we clearly state that we make sure that your photos are both owned by you and portable. I mean, we're an open source project and somehow we got lumped together with the rest of the "me too" photo services which all operate in a silo - including ZingZang. Nowhere on the ZingZang site do they talk about getting your photos out of their system. I don't even see an API which is the most basic step in not holding photos hostage. Unsure how this post came to be and how the author believes ZingZang doesn't hold your photos hostage.
@Jaisen Mathai
Just realized Rip was the author who originally covered OpenPhoto. I'll cut him some slack since he did a good job the first time. I'll assume he accidentally included OpenPhoto in the "me too" list :).
@Joseph Ansanelli
Jaisen Mathai For most users, they just want a way to click download and get all their photos back and we at ZangZing do that... While we are also working on an API, normal every day people can download any of their photos at any time right now and we also let you decide if they want to let anyone else to download them too. It's sites like Flickr that truly picnap photos. You upload with a free account and the only way to get the originals back is to pay them. Shutterfly is the same. ZangZing does not do that. We let you download your photos at any time.
@Kevin Hornschemeier
Joseph Ansanelli If that's all most users want there are services already available that allow free downloading. I'm not seeing what's novel or differentiating about ZangZing.
@Jaisen Mathai
Joseph Ansanelli Allowing users to download their photos is one small step towards giving "ownership" and making their photos portable. But if you've got 20,000 photos uploaded to a service then it becomes quickly useless. This quickly becomes the case when you offer tools to import from other services. I think that's all most users want because that's the only option every service has given them. In that sense ZingZang isn't really much different from Picasa (via Google's Liberation Front) and Smugmug, right? Or am I missing something? I explain this a bit in my interview with Robert Scoble: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEDnms98T-Q I do agree that Flickr and every photo printing service are the worst offenders though :).
@Joseph Ansanelli
Kevin Hornschemeier We think there are lots of things people want - Adding photos from anywhere, easy to use group photo sharing, control over sharing (publicly, privately), great design and ease of use. While Rip highlights downloading as a key thing it's not the only thing... It is something that some services do not let you do unless you pay, e.g. Flickr.
@Richard Lauren
Jaisen Mathai How about a photo-sharing service that never requires you to share the IP/copyrights in the first-place? Would that be better than ZangZing for privacy? How does forcing your users to share their IP rights simply to use your service help their privacy exactly? In fact, how does the ZangZing agreement below safeguard users privacy at all? "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed) as part of the Service"
@Kevin Hornschemeier
Joseph Ansanelli In that case the article probably shouldn't be titled "The New ZangZing Will Never Keep Your Photos Hostage" since Rip nor you have talked about how that's being solved or how that's different than what's out there now. In fact I don't see how anything you've mentioned is different than what's already out there. I've been a SmugMug user for many years and I've been able to download my photos from the beginning. The best example you can give is being better than Flickr, but that's a pretty low bar to set for yourself.
@Farhad Tarapore
Flickr has all of this and more.
@Jason Karas
"The world doesn't need another photo sharing app" preamble is getting old. The space is getting sliced into meaningful use-cases and offers. It's time the we start to talk about it in a more structured way, e.g., geo apps (trover), printing apps (postagram), consolidation apps (ZangZing?), tools (camera+)...
@Darryl Lee
Rip - you buried the lede. It's not about captive photos or public/private sharing. It's about taking on Facebook Photos. * As commenters below will attest, there are plenty of services (albeit paid) that do not "keep your photos hostage." To wit, Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug all allow you to download single images, full albums, and your entire collection. (Third-party tools may be required, but they also all have fairly robust APIs to enable this.) * Re: public/private sharing, again all three allow you to create fully public or fully private albums, with or without passwords. Nothing new here. The only slightly thing interesting with ZangZing is their social play. But as I look closer, it seems that they're trying to do what Phanfare did in January 2008 with Phanfare 2.0 -- go to a freemium model and try to build their own social network. They too had a dashboard that showed you the photo activity of friends and family. No chat, but certainly commenting, adding friends/family, etc. By June 2009 Phanfare abandoned this plan. They couldn't compete with Facebook. Nobody wanted to join yet another social network, especially just to view somebody's photos, unless it was your mom. Would love to hear how ZangZing intends to not fail in exactly the same way.
@Darryl Lee
Oh yeah, but I do have to give them props for a nice UI. Compared to Flickr/SmugMug/Phanfare, it's beautiful. Unfortunately, every damn thing I click on, Follow, Comment, Like eventually ends up popping up a "Create an account or Sign-In" dialogue box. And there's your problem right there. It *might* be mitigated if you allowed Facebook Connect, but even then, both SmugMug and Phanfare have found that nobody clicks on Facebook links to take you to outside sites to view photos. Photo thumbs in posts to external photo sites (and every other site) are presented poorly in the News Feed compared to Facebook Albums. So I reckon clickthrough rates are pretty dismal. That's gotta be why pro (and amateurs) photographers have demanded and gotten SmugMug and Phanfare to give them an option to actually *upload* your photos to Facebook Albums, as opposed to posting an external link that nobody clicks on.