The Post Flickr World – TroveBox

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One of the many benefits of my Shuttleworth Fellowship is getting to hang out with other Shuttleworth Fellows twice a year at a meeting called The Gathering. They are an insanely bright, motivated, talented group of people. Take, for example, Marcin Jakubowski who is building the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), “an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts.” I’m still a little in awe of the scope of work he has taken on…

Another of the fellows, Jaisen Mathai, is working on an open source photo management platform called TroveBox. This really terrific looking photo management platform can use almost anything for its backend storage – including Amazon S3 and Dropbox. Given the way that the Googles and Yahoo!s of the world are behaving lately, I was extremely excited to see a high quality, open source front end set of photo management tools that lets me store photos where ever I want. I connected my account to S3 and imported all my photos in about 15 minutes (note: their automated Flickr importer requires a Pro subscription). Of course I could have imported my Flickr photos by hand for free, but I was more than happy to pay to get my 2000+ photos plus all their metadata moved in 15 minutes.

This is my first move in a more deliberate process influenced by Jim Groom and other’s continued thinking and writing about taking back control of our digital personal identities with A Domain of One’s Own and Syndication-Oriented Architectures. I love the idea of an open source front end I can run myself if need be, and multiple options for backend storage that are VERY easy to switch between.

Check out the platform by poking around my account here: https://opencontent.trovebox.com/photos/list.

3 thoughts on “The Post Flickr World – TroveBox”

  2. David,
    That is awesome! And, as you know, the vision behind Reclaim Your Domain that Audrey Watters, Kin Lane, Philip Schmidt and I worked on two months ago is trying to do that across all one’s existing third party services through RSS and APIs. I am really interested in this project, and after ds106-in-a-box, this is next đŸ™‚ Thanks for sharing this, I am excite to see people doing stuff like this, the Shuttleworth Foundation grant seems like a pretty inspired community.

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