The disaggregation of photo management

Peter Nixey’s post, along with the comments and related Hacker News discussion, highlight the current frustrations with photo management.

Historically, photo management was solved by a single product, such as iPhoto, that did a reasonable job for most people. Photos were taken at events, synced manually over a cable, organized around events and albums, edited using the photo management software’s tools, saved locally, and shared directly.

The shift to mobile devices and the rise of cameras that are always connected has changed things. It has changed how we take photos, our sync and save expectations, our organization methods, and our sharing behavior.

Adding to the problem is that there isn’t a common way that we manage our photos. Individual needs and expectations differ across all aspects of photo management.

My guess on the solution? The disaggregation of photo management.

Companies such as Dropbox will provide the plumbing (sync and save).

Companies such as Aviary will power the editing functionality across a variety of services.

Organize and share will be increasingly coupled, delivered by a number of different services (startups in this space today: Tracks, Albumatic, Cluster, Days, etc.)

Even browse and discovery experiences are changing. Services will increasingly leverage context to deliver photos in intelligent ways (see Timehop’s Dropbox integration).

All of this raises the question: what does this mean for startups like Picturelife and Everpix that, from sync to save, are working on the entire photo management problem?