After Kodak's announcement that without a purchase, pictures go boom, Shutterfly restates its intent: Shutterfly has no minimum yearly purchase (or ever) to keep accounts active, and archives photos at full resolution.
Recently in Photography Category
Apple slams door on HomePage on 7-July-2009: The Web-based page-building tools in MobileMe (the service formerly known as .Mac) will be removed. Any published Web pages will remain in place. However, pages can't be edited or deleted. Which means that if you don't want a permanent archive of a page about your cat that you posted 4 years ago in a fit of sleeplessness, now is the time to remove it. Apple no longer offers a Web-based site building tool, but the firm sells iWeb for Mac OS X for creating simple and rich media sites and blogs.
Apple is also killing Groups on 7-July, as was previously known: Groups was a way to share content among several people who would be granted pooled storage as well as a group email list. Content will be shunted to a Groups folder in the group creator's MobileMe iDisk labeled "Groups Archive". Groups features will simply stop working on that date.
AT&T and Verizon bundled the Pro level of Yahoo's Flickr service as a freebie for its DSL and fiber subscribers:
That deal is now over, and Flickr Pro accounts obtained in this manner will revert to free versions on 31-January-2009. Flickr Pro typically costs $24.95 per year.
Flickr has always been relatively kind and generous with its behavior and storage, both before and after its acquisition by Yahoo. In this transition, they note that if your account reverts back to free after 31-January, you don't lose any data. While you can only view or download the most recent 200 images, they retain your data indefinitely. If you upgrade to Pro on your own, all your images return.
Flickr also notes that if you had a Flickr Pro account and then activated AT&T or Verizon's free deal, however long you had remaining in your subscription will be applied. If used 6 months of a 12-month subscription, for instance, your Flickr Pro account will last through 31-July-2009 instead of 31-January.
AT&T and Verizon both brand their services with Yahoo; it's possible there's a lot more changing in those deals, too.
That deal is now over, and Flickr Pro accounts obtained in this manner will revert to free versions on 31-January-2009. Flickr Pro typically costs $24.95 per year.
Flickr has always been relatively kind and generous with its behavior and storage, both before and after its acquisition by Yahoo. In this transition, they note that if your account reverts back to free after 31-January, you don't lose any data. While you can only view or download the most recent 200 images, they retain your data indefinitely. If you upgrade to Pro on your own, all your images return.
Flickr also notes that if you had a Flickr Pro account and then activated AT&T or Verizon's free deal, however long you had remaining in your subscription will be applied. If used 6 months of a 12-month subscription, for instance, your Flickr Pro account will last through 31-July-2009 instead of 31-January.
AT&T and Verizon both brand their services with Yahoo; it's possible there's a lot more changing in those deals, too.
AOL sent out a reminder to users of its AOL Pictures service yesterday reminding folks that pictures are shredded on 31-December-2008. AOL says it's working with American Greetings Photoworks to allow a no-transfer-needed switchover using one's AOL screen name and password. (That's bad for security reasons, but go figure.)
AOL is also allowing a complete download using a software tool they developed, and will burn you a DVD of your remaining images.
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.
