Photos present a challenge because we want to share them and also retain the rights to them. That's where OpenPhoto comes in. This free, open-source project makes photos easy to upload, tag and control by hosting in your Dropbox account or Amazon S3.

Uploading photos via the Web interface is as easy as drag-and-drop. Batch upload is supported, so I simply dropped a few photos onto my browser window and they uploaded quickly. OpenPhoto lets you tag, title, and describe every photo, and you can also mark it private or public and pick a license for it. Public photos show up on your gallery at http://yourname.openphoto.me. Users browsing your photos can leave comments, but must log in to do so.

OpenPhoto's true promise is that it is not just a service, but an open-source application as well. Anyone is welcome to take the source code (hosted on Github) and customize it or add any missing features.

OpenPhoto is a young project; Pricing hasn’t been introduced, and customization options are minimal. There's no end-user documentation at the moment, either. This tripped me up when I linked OpenPhoto to my Dropbox account, and then copied some photos into Dropbox. I waited and waited, until I realized I must upload the photos from within OpenPhoto's Web interface for the service to recognize them.

OpenPhoto shows great promise. If you're a photographer looking to host your photos with Dropbox or Amazon S3 and display them in a lovely public gallery, you can use the service right now. And with a bit of technical know-how, you could even host OpenPhoto itself on your own hardware, making for a slick, self-hosted solution.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download use this Web-based software.

--Erez Zukerman