It's like a regular cloud storage but there's IPFS under the hood instead of traditional server so you don't really need to care about things like backups or migrating photos from one place to another. As for copyright protection, it works by confirming your equipment first and then issuing a digitally signed copyright statement where you state that you are the rightful owner and attach a license (for example, Creative Commons). This statement is stored on-chain and can be verified by anyone so they know it's true. I suggest checking https://anagolay.network/ to know more about the underlying technology
Good point, I'm with you on this one. The goal of the sharing mechanics is to be like a layer over IPFS that gives you additional features like adding on-the-fly image transformations (meaning you set ?width=100px in the URL and the server processes the image before showing it to whoever requested it) and analytics (which gives you the ability to see from which sources your photos are being accessed. This can also be a huge help in fighting unauthorized use -- if you see views coming from some shady site, you can immediately check it and file the copyright claim). And in addition to all this you also preserve full metadata, which (1) is useful to prove your ownership and (2) will help in further licensing since we also add metadata for getting a "licenseable" mark in Google Images.
I agree that NFTs were largely overhyped, and what we're doing here is completely different. Not every decentralized storage system is a blockchain, and neither is IPFS. Simply speaking, IPFS is a network of hundreds of computers storing pieces of your files independently. So, instead of opening a URL and requesting file XYZ, you say, "I need file XYZ; whoever has it, give it to me," and whoever has it gives it to you. This is decentralized storage in a nutshell. What we are doing here is using IPFS as storage and giving photographers a toolkit that makes it super convenient to work with it, plus quality-of-life improvements like analytics and an in-built image editor. I hope this helps dispel your doubts.
Ahhh, I see what you mean now. This is exactly our point too so once you have the link you can display it anywhere, be it a blog, comment section, git repo, etc.
You have a good point, let me explain a bit more how do we plan to tackle what you mentioned. As for making files public and persisting files you upload: for the beta period all files are public but once we validate the idea and improve things overall, we will also add the private storage, which will be the default option; as for storage, eventually we will give options to either use rely on us to persist the files or use persistent storage of your choice (Filecoin, Crust, Arweave) and manage it via our app UI. Regarding the copyright: it is not enforced since enforced implies taking legal or administrative actions but we can prevent a fair share of infringement in the first place by carrying the copyright attribution in the original file and all modified variants, which also makes post-enforcement actions easier. Say, you embed the image from Macula on a website and some bot scrapes it. In this case the image will still carry correct attribution. And also one thing about enforcing. Part of it requires verifying that you're the original author and for that we are developing a blockchain-based network called Anagolay, which will take care of creating digitally signed cryptographic authorship statement and will have the mechanism so that any outside observer can validate that you are indeed the author.
Hope this helps, let me know if there's anything you'd like to hear in more details.
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