Tabblo: pictures of Linux at work

[Photo: Antonio and Guido -- get from Antonio]

If you're looking to make something more of your digital photos than the usual online gallery, Tabblo has ways to do it. In addition to your basic Gimp (or, to the less free, PhotoShop) tools (crop, zoom, add text, etc.), Tabblo lets you lay out, annotate and share "tabblos" (a pun off "tabbleaus") of photo sets, or to output them in various print forms through offline services. All from inside a browser.

As Tabblo founder and CEO Antonio Rodriguez puts it, "If you have a story to tell with pictures, we have ways for you to tell it -- online and off". He also says Tabblo's own story would not be possible without Linux. To get that story, we did a brief interview.

LJ: Why this business, and why now?

AR: This is something the market has needed for a long time, but the conditions weren't right. The web browser wasn't built to do serious multimedia processing, and until recently it wasn't possible to do it on the server -- at least not with economics that worked for anyone trying to build a business out of it. If you wanted to do server-side image editing at high scale, for example, the cost of the software and hardware involved was simply prohibitive. If you wanted to have a rich database things like metadata-based navigation, unlimited undo, the cost of the Oracle licenses at volume would probably put you flat out of the business of providing any meaningful functionality for free in order to attract customers. And most importantly, if you wanted to store gigs and gigs of people's pictures, NetApp or EMC were the only games in town– at economics that only make sense for investment banks and NASA. I can say without any doubt that there was absolutely NO WAY that we could provide the level of application provided to users at launch for free without the benefit of our modified LAMP stack and its associated development practices. I am particularly sensitive to this because of how many photo sites in the past that have actually tried to make money have been undone by spiraling capital expenses and wrong assumptions about the likely uptake of revenue generating products.

LJ: What's in your stack?

AR: For hardware we use custom-made whitebox AMD64 boxes with plenty of horsepower per dollar of cost, running Debian AMD64 (which greatly lowers our sysadmin costs). We run our own clustered file system built mostly on top of the Apache 2.0 stack (as modules) and get throughput that commercial storage solutions can't touch mostly because the software is written specifically for our workload. The image servers also leverage the Apache runtime, as well as ImageMagick. Our database is MYSQL5 which is great for its ability to be set up in very funky configurations that let you optimize writes, reads, or replication depending on your own needs. And finally, our webapp is written in Python which is both lightning fast to develop in and incredibly clean as a dynamically-typed language.

LJ: How do you plan to evolve the service.

AR: To start we're going for composition, layout and effects. Next is printing and distribution. We also plan to make everything publishable to blogs though the metaweblog api.

Tabblo also makes the most of what's "mashable" from other web services, over open APIs. When Antonio showed me Tabblo's beta service at O'Reilly's eTech conference in February, he populated my own Tabblo library by copying more than six thousand photos from my collection at Flickr. He did this also to demonstrate the "well-behaved" nature of Flickr as a Net citizen. Rather than locking up customer data, Flickr is wide open, allowing users on other services to access and use photos, including all kinds of photo metadata, including tags. Tabblo, he told me, also aims to be equally responsible to what he calls "the open marketplace".

Thus what's open about Linux-based infrastructure expands out to support whole marketplaces.

- Doc Searls