MetaMorPic: Self-Contained Photo Archival and Presentation

Cost associated with the maintenance and scale of custom services presents one of the most significant barriers to entry for information providers. One solution proposes pushing computation into the cloud where providers like Amazon maintain a scalable, world-wide platform for virtualization. While this avoids certain hardware maintenance costs, service providers must still maintain clusters of virtual machines. To address this, contextual services like Flickr provide a complete solution; unfortunately, this limits information providers to the available services and look-and-feel. We propose a compromise solution that combines existing services and applications. Such a solution decreases development and maintenance costs by providing standardized services with third-party maintenance, while allowing customizable functionality and look-and-feel. We present a specific example of this type of blended solution in our MetaMorPic system, which provides photo archiving and presentation capabilities using third-party software and services.