Photo Project

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(Redirected from Trovebox)


The Photo Project (formerly Trovebox, before that OpenPhoto β€” still mentioned in source/docs) was a photo application project that lets you store your photos on Dropbox, Amazon S3, or in your garage, and serve them from URLs on your own domain.

Formerly

Trovebox

2015-03-31 site-death: The Photo Project used to be Trovebox, both an open source project by that name, and an online service to "organize and share photos and videos with clients and colleagues" at trovebox.com (parked GoDaddy domain as of 2016-05-16) which shut down as of 2015-03-31. The code was kept as open source, though, if you want to maintain a version on your own site.

2013 service focus over open source: Before trovebox.com shutdown, development on the open source, self-hosted "Trovebox Community Edition" appears to have slowed dramatically in mid-2013, possibly to focus on the commercial Trovebox product (Need more info on this).

OpenPhoto

Before Trovebox, the project and service was known as OpenPhoto, at theopenphotoproject.org which as of 2016-05-16 returns a 403 PHP error:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /php.cgi/index.html on this server.

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their own site:

  • User:Upon2020.com (Johannes Ernst) is running a private instance for his family pictures
  • ...

Former Examples

  • User:Waterpigs.co.uk (Barnaby Walters) http://waterpigs.co.uk/ was running an instance of Trovebox to host his photos at http://photos.waterpigs.co.uk/ - it's now dead/offline, "pending transfer of relevant content to Taproot".

    I could probably attempt to debug the JS-related problem but would rather put that time into making getting Taproot displaying photo posts better. -Barnaby

Criticism

Insufficient Selfdogfooding

Insufficient Selfdogfooding. Of the 13 "core team" creators listed on the site only one is self-hosting an instance of Trovebox/OpenPhoto. And it appears to be broken. (based on links from http://theopenphotoproject.org/team because there does not appear to be a list of Trovebox creators). No known functioning selfdogfooding of Trovebox/OpenPhoto.

Poor odd image size handling

Poor small/odd image size handling -

"I have found it sub-optimal for small images (it scales them up to horrible dimensions) and weirdly shaped images (screenshots/panoramas, both of which i do a lot)" - Barnabywalters on IRC

Poor integration

Poor integration - Trovebox fails to easily integrate with any other posting software, e.g. for posting notes, articles, and photos into a single stream on your homepage.

Poor stream management

Poor stream management -

"it's fine as a full photo management stack, that's just not what I want in terms of publishing a photo stream." - aaronpk on IRC

Reliance on Javascript

Login and Gallery pages both rely on Javascript in order to function, and the latest checkout has several javascript bugs which prevent them from working correctly.

See Also