The thing with SmugMug and, for that matter all other photo sharing services I have found, is that you are forced to use either their custom api or applications built specifically for it. This doesn’t really fit well with the way I work. I don’t want to be forced to choose from a small group of tools for what is really quite a generic task – uploading photos.

The other thing I realised was that I did not want to selectively upload photos to the web and immediately create albums from them. I actually care about ALL of my photos. I want them all to be safe all of the time. What I want to do is say ‘here is the folder where I store all my images, back it up online, yes all of it!’ By doing this I can be sure that all of my images are safe – whether  I got around to creating an album or not.

From this I worked out that where I store my photos is my business. The image sharing service that I use should not prescribe this for me! If the photo sharing service provided a choice as to which storage service to use then I could choose the one that best suites my needs.

That is the primary reason that I built ZAVAM – to bring more choice to photo sharing services.

Initially ZAVAM will only support one storage service (Amazon S3), this may sounds like a contradicion to everything I have just said. However this will still enable a lot of people to benefit from using what has become a very popular storage service. More storage services will be added once I have added a decent amount of features.

ZAVAM will be launching soon. Please email beta@zavam.com to get early access.