Nice to see this timeline. After a failed photo startup, we launched Credit Card Terminal for iPhone in October 2008. It took Apple around two months to approve it, during which we received one of the famous "requiring unexpected additional time for review" emails. I'm pretty sure they didn't quite know what to make of it back then. April 2009 really kicked things off though when Apple put our app, along with Print n Share and FedEx, in a "There's an app for that" tv ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZxpljDz4Wc
Thanks for the feedback. This is exactly the kind of detailed feedback we were hoping for.
A revised landing page is in the works. You gave us a ton more to think about :)
RE: squares. We do create square thumbnails (it lets us fit a lot more on a page, especially at 1024x768). Clicking the thumbnails goes to a larger, correctly aspected version, and of course there's the original photo data as well.
At Photosleeve we're trying to eliminate the photo workflow. We've made it so that you can plug in your camera, and a few minutes later have an email full of your photos that you can share. No more manual copying, resizing, rotating, uploading, backing-up, etc. Just one step.
We recently enabled signups and are looking for feedback. Here are some specifics:
* We use a two-stage upload process so we can satisfy instant gratification and give lasting peace of mind. First, smaller versions of your photos are uploaded so that you can share quickly. Once that's done we back up your original photo data to S3. You can use the originals for printing, or just so you can stop worrying about your hard drive crashing and taking your photos with it.
* You can upload photos from your camera to email/web in a single step (copies, rotates, resizes, uploads, sends email) using the Windows desktop app
* Alternatively, you can upload using the web-uploader, which also resizes photos before uploading them, and does it all right within your browser (uses Silverlight + Flash)
* We'll send you an email with thumbnails of your photos right in it (HTML mail) that you can forward to people without clogging their inboxes
* You can use drag-and-drop within your browser to create albums, export to Facebook, order prints, create another email, etc. You can try some actions on our demo site, http://www.photosleeve.com/user/demo/album/eiffel-tower