Why we’re building Loom | Loom

Photo management is still broken – we want to change that. Especially ever since we started taking photos with our smartphones and tablets and viewing them on multiple screens it’s gotten worse. As we upgraded our devices over the years, we started taking higher resolution photos and videos and realized we hit storage space limits quicker than before. We realized that we needed simple and reliable cloud storage for our photos and videos, accessible from any device. How could it be possible that something so obvious doesn’t yet exist? We started talking to people and asked how they felt about their current photo management system and discovered they were even more frustrated than us! We learned about the hassle and complexity of managing and storing photos from devices to desktops to the web. Think how difficult it is to access photos from your external hard drive on your iPad. It’s 2013, a private company has a rocket in space, we have self driving cars and quantum computers, yet it’s almost impossible to access and manage your photo and video library on a mobile device.

Existing services in the market still haven’t solved this problem. Although you can back up files to the cloud, they aren’t focused on your photos and videos nor concerned with providing the best possible mobile experience.  In order to organize and edit your photos and videos, you have to go through your desktop. Considering that people now create and consume content on their mobiles more than their desktop, it doesn’t make sense anymore to have a desktop-based cloud storage solution. Also, when you sync your files into the cloud, they actually store them on your computer or device, taking up local storage space.

From our first users of our alpha version, we learned of an even bigger problem that was counter-intuitive. Content creation and media file sizes are growing more rapidly than storage space on devices. In other words, we’re getting better camera technology that is taking larger files compared to a few years ago, but our flash drives and SSDs are not improving at the same speed. In fact, space has been crippled when we switched from normal hard drives to SSDs.

We uncovered what needed to happen next in cloud storage: content needs to be easily stored in the cloud from any device and cached intelligently. This means that your media library should no longer be taking local disk space on your smartphones or computer.  We need something that works seamlessly, a personal media library that is the same wherever you go, and there when you need it. Ideally, you wouldn’t have to take time to think about personal content management anymore. Photos and videos would upload securely to your cloud without you having to do anything. You would be able to access, edit, organize, and manage your entire media library on any device – without having to think about syncing, copying, transferring, storage, file size, or media format type.

This is what we want to solve once and for all. That’s why we’ve built Loom – to keep your photos and videos organized securely in the cloud, so you have more space to play.

Coming soon, www.loom.com