zenfolio.com and similar cater to a professional market where people shoot photos for a living, e.g. events like weddings & ceremonies and they upload lots of big files. And they offer an unlimited account for $50/year. In this case it is always important how the average volume amortizes across a big user base.
Yep, an uploader would be neat but it gets really ugly really fast with many different platforms to think about.
The problem with an import from other services seems to be image quality (services like social networks) or API availability (photo hosting services for pro photographers).
The drag'n'drop is the best we could do on the "our effort"/"user convenience" scale for an MVP, I am definitely thinking hard about ways to get in images fast and in the original quality.
Maybe the right way is to focus on dropbox/backup storage imports.
If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them :)
> an uploader would be neat but it gets really ugly really
> fast with many different platforms to think about.
edit: You might even easily create your own webdav-client for windows (the black sheep when it comes to dav-support), either working off existing dav-libraries, or possibly by throwing some money at an existing free/shareware project.
As a consumer I'm always incredibly wary of things that seem too good to be true. I don't understand how you can scale the economics of $8/month with unlimited storage. When I see that it induces scepticism that you'll be around for the long term, and one thing I really do not want is my lifetime archive of photos suddenly disappearing on me one day.
A second point - for me these days, getting photos uploaded to storage is as key as the storage itself. If you have a story about that (smart phone apps, background uploaders, APIs, dropbox, picasa, flickr or other integration) then I would like to see it. The drag and drop is neat, but it doesn't work at scale. I want something that's going to upload the photos automatically.