I would never trust a startup with my photos UNLESS they were building an open source platform that could run on my own hardware, similar to openphoto.

The fact is, I'd much rather have everything local and pay a backup provider a small annual fee to keep a client-side encrypted backup for me.

I have plenty of bandwidth to my house for sharing photos and videos with friends. All I'm missing is the low-power plug server to host the app. It doesn't make sense for my photos and videos to live in a data center with low latency disk, Gbit networks and redundant power and cooling -- it's total overkill.

Photo and video storage is a perfect application for user hosted SaaS since there's so little cross-talk between users, and the vast majority of data is almost never looked at.

By the way, just because it's running on my own hardware, doesn't mean I wouldn't pay a monthly fee for the software!