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design_philosophy

Design Philosophy

Why Use Photo Organizer at all?

The short version: We can modify this user agreement at any time, without notice

Control

Who do you trust with your data? Picture this, if you will: You've invested hundreds of hours of your time importing and categorizing your photographs using an online photo hosting company. After a couple of months, they amend their user agreement (which they can do at any time) and you are now faced with the prospect of paying more money for the same service. They also update their “Acceptable use” policy and it turns out that a quarter of your images have to be taken down. What do you do? If you're lucky, you can re-download all of your photographs, but most likely without any of the categorization. Worse yet, what do you do if they just shut down?

An excellent summary of this problem can be found here: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192983&cid=15837853

While you, as a photographer, may not be particularly interested in databases and web servers, Photo Organizer gives you complete control over your photographs. Your data cannot be held hostage by a unilateral change by another person or company, not even the original software developers.

Privacy

As Photo Organizer is intended to be a photographer's primary image repository, it is quite plausible you wish to keep images around but not display them to the public (or other users). Photo Organizer lets you specify access permissions on a per-folder and per-image basis, so only those who are allowed to see any particular images can do so. Please note that we do not condone anything illegal. Your local laws always apply.

Openness

Photo Organizer uses off-the-shelf Free and Open Source Software, and is itself licensed under the GPLv2. This means that even if the original developers abandon the software, its users will always have the right to continue using it, fix bugs, and add new features themselves. This openness also ensures that your all-important data can never be held hostage by someone else.

Network Accessible

Instead of being tied to one computer when managing or accessing your photos, you can do so on any computer with a web browser. Additionally, third parties access the same site as the users, so there is never a question of keeping multiple sites in sync. Any changes made are instantly reflected to all other users.

Scalability

Photo Organizer easily handles hundreds of thousands of photographs, and is limited only by the amount of disk space of its server. With its advanced searching capabilities, you'll never have problems finding another image again.

design_philosophy.txt · Last modified: 2013/12/23 13:52 by pizza