*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.”
       

[fatrat]

i don't know the BEST site but yahoo photos gives you 30mb for free and you can buy more and i have found it reliable so far.

[Jeff Gordon]

I went web host hunting this weekend. My old web host company got sold to a new web host company. The new company fumbled the ball. After 20 days without a web site and 14 days without my domain name mail service, I decided to look around.

The best I found was www.hostsave.com

6.95/month
No set up fee
60 MB storage

I did a net searching on them. They got good reports.

I signed up, got my domain transfered and new domanin name web site and email operational in 24 hours.

The old host still has not been able recover most of the web sites they bought. If you want to know who NOT to buy from, send me an FR Email.

[IronJack]

I remember it as Other Days, Other Eyes, but I DO remember it. In fact, I've got it here somewhere. Talk about a blast from the past ...

[Snow Bunny]

HI my dear friend.I had to find another photo storing place and then reload all the photos. I still have about 30 floppy disks to reload to the new place.

It meant having to re-do my profile page and I still have to re-do some of the last page of my homepage and change the address for my photo albums.

Uncle Geogre, it was awful. All the USO Canteen threads I did , the graphics are gone from the old threads whereever I posted things.

Oh well, it is not life and death, just tons of work getting another place, and reloading all the graphics and pictures to it.Plus the money I paid photopoint for a year is gone.
They must be liberals that ran it....no honor.

Soooooo good to see you !!!

(((((((((( HUG )))))))))))

[spectr17]

Thanks for the info, I passes it on to some friends who are shopping. Looks like it beats my deal too.