*Fading photos* Photopoint comes up blank, frustrating digital camera users

msNBC ^ | 01.05.01 | Lisa Somebody that tells us squat!

[Registered]

Fading photos Photopoint comes up blank, frustrating digital camera users
By Lisa Napoli MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR		Jan. 4 —  Richard Unten, a college student in Irvine, California, has friends all over the state and family in Hawaii. His Web site is a centralized virtual space where all the people in his life can see his pictures. Or, rather, could. The company that hosts his digital photo album disappeared just before the holidays.

       IF YOU TYPE the words “photo hosting” into the Yahoo search engine, Photopoint is the third listing that comes up. But if you try to access the site, you get nothing. Calls and e-mails to published contacts associated with the business have either not been returned, or have bounced back as undeliverable.
       Industry analysts say the service boasted around 1.5 million members, including Richard Unten, who paid $20 a year to store their photos online.
       “As a paying member to the photo hosting service, I have no idea if Photopoint.com still exists. It seems that no one knows. Pantellic Software, the owners of Photopoint, doesn’t even have a statement available to the public, let alone its paying customers, about the future of the service,” Unten said in an e-mail interview.
       Frustrated Photopoint customers experienced a similar blackout in service in July. Servers were dark and links were dead for about a week then. The explanation was that Photopoint was being acquired by Pantellic, the Nova Scotia-based company that had created the service in the first place. After the blackout, users got an e-mail from Dale Gass, Pantellic’s chief executive. It said, in part:

"I would like to apologize for any uncertainty that our members may have experienced during the transition of ownership. Your photos, albums, and memberships were never at any risk of loss. The safety and integrity of our members’ photos has always been, and will continue to be, our number one priority. We understand how important your photos are to you.”

DEAD PICTURE LINKS

       Unten and others buzzing on Internet digital photography news groups take this as an empty claim, as their friends click on links that yield no pictures. Some Photopoint users used the service to house pictures for merchandise they were selling on eBay, making for not just an inconvenience but an economic wrinkle to the mystery for some.
       In an attempt to vent and find some answers, many of these users have been calling and writing to EzPrints.com, an online service that makes prints from digital photographs which a partnership with Photopoint.
       Jamie Bardin, chief executive of EZPrints, said he had no answers for them. One panicked user told him every photo he’d taken of his toddler was stored on Photopoint.

DEVELOPING INDUSTRY

       The larger issue is the transitioning business of digital photography. There are still “not enough people shooting digital,” Bardin said, although this past Christmas, digital camera sales made up 20 percent of all camera sales.
       “We’re still probably three, four years away from where digital cameras will outsell film. When you start to see that, that’s when this industry will start to take off,” Bardin said.
       And as with most things related to the Internet, there is strange post dot-com boom math involved. As the online photo industry takes off and matures, the number of players in the field decreases.
       Whitney Brown, a spokeswoman for Shutterfly, a competitor of Photopoint, explained. “At one point there were 300 companies that did bits and parts of online photo processing,” she said, as eager entrepreneurs tried to hedge their bets and create new online businesses. Many of them didn’t charge for services, in an attempt to create a buzz and online traffic — and found, as Photopoint did, that giving away services for free did not a business make. (They later started charging a fee.)
       Says Brown, “The lunacy of those days has passed.”
       The “lunacy” has given way to mergers of smaller companies and acquisitions by late-to-the-digital-game industry players like Kodak, which purchased a Shutterfly competitor, Ofoto, last year.
       Now, consumers can more readily find photo processing services under one virtual roof — from the hosting of digital photos to the printing of hard copies to the transformation of a favorite snap into a t-shirt.
       That still doesn’t explain what happened to Photopoint, which Brown says her company has attempted to reach since its disappearance, with an eye toward picking up customers who were left in the dark. She’s had no success, either. (Neither has Ofoto, said James Joaquin, the company’s president.)
       Epson, another of Photopoint’s partners, makes a cryptic reference to the site’s disappearance on its pages, saying that it’s taking photo hosting services in-house and that user photos won’t be available until Jan. 10.
       For many, it’s the digital age equivalent of the local dry cleaners closing its doors — with your clothing padlocked inside.
       “I would be panicked if I was a consumer,” said Brown of Shutterfly. “It’s unfortunate.”
       

[Registered]

Frankly, I'm surprised this story isn't all over the place. 1.2 million users just sitting around picking their noses?

[Registered]

Oh, here's a great link to eBayers that are picking their noses waiting for Photopoint news...

[Timesink]

The safety and integrity of our members’ photos has always been, and will continue to be, our number one priority."

Of course, even your number one priority is meaningless if you go out of business.

[Registered]

Perfect illustration.

Caption reads, "I just paid my Photopoint bill, wonder when they'll come back online?"

[Howlin]

“We’re still probably three, four years away from where digital cameras will outsell film.

Well, on the one hand, I'm ahead of my time.

On the other hand, I've been had.

Maybe some day some nice, kind person will tell me how to upload my pictures to my Road Runner web site (she sez, in her best Blanche DeBuis accent.)

"I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."

[Registered]

Well, I'm probably not the best person to instruct you, I lack patience when it comes to "instructing others"...so if you're not willing to email me the pics along with your domain, user id and password information you might want to look elsewhere ;-)

[Howlin]

Well, geez, I'll leave the password to my Zone Alarm at the end of this thread. Then help yourself! (They're all yours anyway :-)

[Registered]

Another caption, sung to the Dr. Pepper theme.."I'M A PICKER, YOU'RE A PICKER, WOULDN'T CHA LIKE TO BE A PICKER TOO?"

[Registered]

Just send me the information Darlin and I promise to chew it up and forget it once I'm done...oh, and send me your credit card numbers along with SS#, DOB, and home phone. Thanks.

[jrherreid]

Or how about "Digital camera, $300. Adobe Photoshop, $100. Paying $20 a year to store your pictures on a nonexistent website, priceless."

[Skibane]

NO ACCOUNTABILITY ON THE INTERNET: Reason Number 73 why the Net PC was another one of Larry Ellison's bad ideas!

[Tennessee_Bob]

Then again, there's always Photoisland.com.

 

[Bush2000]

NO ACCOUNTABILITY ON THE INTERNET: Reason Number 73 why the Net PC was another one of Larry Ellison's bad ideas!

"The network is the computer"; hence, the network is down.

[Howlin]

Just use Laz's like we all did during the last Freepathon.

[agitator]

One panicked user told him every photo he’d taken of his toddler was stored on Photopoint.

What a maroon.

Has it occurred to anybody besides me that paper is as close to permanent as we know it for photographic purposes but digital is is only as good as the technological standard? When was the last time anybody broke out their Super 8 movie projector? That was 25 years ago. How many people still have turntables that work? RLL hard drives and first generation IDE went away 10 years ago. People act like computers have been around forever when I remember multitasking with Desqview under DOS 3.1 and Windoze is effectively a whole 8 years old. Anybody wanna guess on how long current digital storage technology lasts?

[Chapita]

Can't digital photos be stored on a floppy or CD?

[Uncle Sausage]

Try Ofoto at ofoto.com. It's run by Kodak (lots of opportunities to buy prints) so it should be the last one standing, it's free and apparently no mb limit. I've got 19 albums there, one with 162 images and another one with 138. It provides a decent way to share photos with friends and family.

I store my images on my hard disk and a Zip disk as well. Hope to get them on a CDRW someday.

[agitator]

Yeah, digital photos can be stored on floppies or cd's but if you had stored digital photos on a 5-1/4" floppy 7 years ago, do you have a 5-1/4" drive to read those floppies today? My point is that paper sits there. If it's good quality photographic paper, it will still be sitting there 100 years from now. If you don't revise your digital media storage to the latest hardware and software standard every time a new standard arises, one of these days, you're not going to be able to see those pictures anymore. The National Archives is having a fit over this very problem.

[Uncle Sausage]

Transferred my Super 8's to video ages ago ('course thats obsolete now, too) but still have the films and projector; still have a turntable that works and still have a computer with a 5-1/4. Still have about about a thousand prints in a box somewhere. Gonna index them someday, too.