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PhotoPoint.com, a popular but troubled picture-sharing Web site, has been offline for a week. Parent company Pantellic Software's Web site also is down, and this week, Pantellic took Epson's PhotoCenter site down with it.
PhotoPoint went out of business in July and was acquired by Pantellic - a company that builds online photo services for businesses and was the original creator of PhotoPoint. Pantellic purchased PhotoPoint from Sherwood Partners, a crisis management firm that was liquidating PhotoPoint's assets. Neither company could be reached for comment on this story. Keith Kratzberg, the director of photo imaging at Epson, said his company launched its PhotoCenter in April, with PhotoPoint as its third-party vendor "powering" the site. Because of PhotoPoint's troubles, Epson switched to Pantellic in July, he said. Even before Pantellic went dark last Friday, Epson was preparing for the eventuality that it would have to take its photo-sharing site in-house, he said. On Wednesday, Epson decided to turn off the site in order to preserve the photos customers already had stored. "With a site like this, you hate to go dark for any period," said Kratzberg. "We were prepared to go in-house, but it happened more suddenly than expected. But when we could see that Pantellic could no longer support our site, it was more important to keep our members' photo albums intact, rather than try to maximize the time we were up." The people who paid money to put their images online are upset with PhotoPoint for disappearing without a trace. Many of these former customers vented their ire on the F--kedcompany site this week. An individual posting under the handle, "wddbear," wrote, "I have over 950 photos stored there, and they better find a way for me to get them. I paid for a full year and some of those pictures cannot be replaced. I smell a lawsuit coming." Another customer, "gladIpaid," wrote, "Glad I just paid for more space. Goodbye $60.00. No notice, no replies to customer concerns, no information for paying customers, no parent site - not even a splashpage telling us we're f--ked." In a later post, "gladIpaid" added, "Well, although I do have copies of all my photos, when I think about the hours that went into photoshopping them and all the caption information I lost, it makes me mad." Wendell Evans, a freelance journalist based in Philadelphia, Pa., and a former PhotoPoint customer, told Newsbytes the loss of caption information is the most galling part of the situation to him. Evans said he had about 350 photos, letters and newspaper clips on the PhotoPoint system. He is preparing a book on his family's migration across the United States dating back several generations. Through his research, he has discovered 500 living relatives, and gathered numerous pictures and documents. "PhotoPoint was a gathering point, a way to involve all those people," said Evans. "Now, all of those images have vanished into the ether for all I know. It is not so much a loss of money, but it is a loss of convenience and time." Evans said he will have to re-upload 350 items, and recreate the descriptions. "The biggest problem is the captions. They only existed on the PhotoPoint Web site," he said. "I have the information, but I will have to go back through my notes and reunite each photo with the notes. That is a huge loss of time. I am not back to square one, but I am back to square four." One F--kedcompany poster who identified him or herself as "Tannis" and said he or she was a former PhotoPoint employee, defended the company. Tannis wrote, "businesses succeed, businesses fail, businesses face challenges that most customers never have the opportunity to grasp the concept of just exactly what went wrong." "I am confident that if at all possible, PhotoPoint will be back online, and if not, they will make every attempt possible to ensure their users get the opportunity to (retrieve) their photos," Tannis added. Even if that turns out to be true, Evans said he still is upset about the way the company handled things. "It is incredible. I am really annoyed they disappeared without an e-mail or anything," he said. "They could have told us, 'hey, the business didn't work.' It is the deception that bothers me. They don't even return phone calls. They belong in the cybersleaze hall of fame." Photopoint.com used to be at http://www.photopoint.com . Pantellic Software used to be at http://www.pantellic.com . |
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