My first reaction to this situation is that most folks who make software for a living will have steady employment for a long long time.

Here’s the situation. I am looking for a website to use to share my photos with my family. I have the following preferences:

• I want to background sync my files up to the site. I have thousands of photos and generate lots more all the time. I don’t have time for uploads. I want a little bit of client code that I can point at my folders of photos and have them upload to the site automagically. All the uploaders I’ve tried (like Flickr’s for example) invariably fail halfway through large jobs and then I have to figure out where the hell they stopped and end up uploading things twice. I get that the network isn’t perfect. That’s why I want resilient sync.
• I want to protect my photos with a password. Most of my relatives are simply not up for creating accounts in order to access my photos. And even if I can get the bulk of them to create an account the first time, they invariably forget their credentials. Ultimately, requiring logon stops them from seeing the pics. A password isn’t perfect, but I can make it simple and include it with each mail publicizing recently added pictures.
• I want a custom look and feel. No matter how often a website tells me how gorgeous their albums are… they’re almost never what I want. Let me make them look decent with some CSS.
• I want to use my own domain. It’s not hard to do. Charge me extra. But let me name the site the way I want. A subdomain, or my own director isn’t enough. (I’ll admit I could live without this if someone nailed the other three.)

Can anyone name a site that meets the above requirements? I thought PhanFare would be perfect. No luck though. They’re dumping the features I need and turning themselves into a social network. Aren’t there enough social networks? Flickr has a third party sync tool, but fails on the other fronts. Sharpcast is abandoning their photo sharing service for a universal sync tool. SmugMug appears to be the leading candidate, but I cannot spend weeks uploading my pics by hand to the site — no sync.

Can someone give me the photo site I need? I’ll admit, my needs are not that of the average user. But I don’t believe they’re mine alone. And I’m willing to pay for this service. As best I can tell, the service that I want (and that I suspect a decent number of other people want) doesn’t exist. And frankly, I find it pretty surprising that it doesn’t at this point.

I believe that as long as there are people willing to pay for software services that don’t exist, there will be plenty of employment for people who make software for a living. (Or maybe I’ve somehow missed the existence of my dream service and we’re all about to find ourselves out of work. :) )