Digital Railroad's abrupt inability to continue operations sparked the creation of ItDied.com: Digital Railroad will likely be cited for years to come as the first in what is likely a wave of service shutdowns by startup firms that leave users hanging. This is no fault of Digital Railroad's (or so I believe with the facts I have right now).
Startup firms rely on their investors' continued interest, and boards are often dominated by venture capitalists and others who might choose to pull the plug for their own reasons, as they have no specific relationship with a company's downstream clientele.
Digital Railroad, a stock photography site that let professional photographers manage their own inventory and sales, had said it was shedding costs in mid-October, but posted a note on 28-October-2008 that the plug would be pulled within 24 hours. A competing firm, PhotoShelter, put in place a plan that helped move some number of photographers' images and other data over. Digital Railroad believes the files will remain intact on servers that are no longer active, and if assets are purchased, photographers may be able to get more data back in the future.
What Digital Railroad's photographers lost is not their images; I can't imagine any pro not having many backups of whatever they uploaded. Rather, the time invested in coding their images to the company's specifications--the metadata. Some photographers reported having spent hundreds of hours on this task. It's unclear, but that metadata is likely lost or unusable.
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