|
About FOTOfinity
Back in 2000, a graduate student at MIT bought a
digital camera and began taking pictures. Lots of pictures. In a span
of four weeks, he managed to amass over 1400 photos of the American
Southwest as his family toured the area. Once home, he needed a way
to get a grip on this multimedia overload. He needed to sort the
photos, label them, keep them organized, edit them anytime, and be
able to access them from anywhere. Preferably, he'd like to know the
date and time each photo was taken, and he'd like to let his family
see the pictures and comment on them too. And thus, the Photo Album
project was born.
Over the years, the photo album grew. Friends started using it, and
demanding new features (how demanding of them! ;-) When research was
slow, photo album development would find itself speeding along. Then,
around June, 2003, after a paper submission deadline had been
successfully overcome, the student (Yu-Han) decided to re-do the photo
album to have a nice interface and more friendly features, and
perhaps, one of these days, to actually sell either the software or
the services he'd developed over all this time. He came up with a
corny name (FOTOfinity), which seemed like a good idea at the time,
connoting photos, infinity, and affinity; and together with the help
of his web designer friend, Allen, he put together a new interface.
Making the site user-friendly was not a very developer friendly task,
but in the end, it seemed quite worth it. The developer appreciated
the resulting ease-of-use, and was happy with the results. Many many
bugs remained to be sorted out, as well as the continued porting of
old features to the new interface. And so here we are today. The
FOTOfinity.com site serves up about 17GB of photos and videos (as of June 2003), along
with all the commentary, captions, and journals people have written
about their photos, their travels, their ideas.
Update and Future Plans
Its Spring of 2006 now, and we're up to 5000 users and over 150 gigabytes of photos and videos. Last fall we completed a major upgrade of our systems, and all of your precious photos are now backed up instantaneously when you upload them. Its great that we're gotten thousans of new members over the past year, and we're trying our best to keep up with all the interest.
We hope you'll keep telling your friends about us, and that you'll support us making a donation to the site. We run this site entirely based on member contributions (and a lot of our own donated time and money), so your support really helps!
I sometimes liken it to NPR with their quarterly fund-raisers. We depend on you, our members, to help support the costs of the photos we bring to you anytime you need them. So, please, give as generously as you can.
NPR asks you for a dollar a day. We're happy if you can even spare a dollar a month.
And while we do not have a car to raffle away, a contribution of $20 will elicit a very grateful email from us! :-)
We still like NPR's final line though: please, be as generous as you can!
And Thanks!
|
