A year without Fotopic

A year ago today, we finally got official news from the administrators about the plight of fotopic. Fotopic was the most popular website on the internet for bus enthusiasts and their photos. Although it was by no means perfect, and seemingly being run down or operated by a skeleton structure, it still did an excellent job at providing viewing opportunities for our photographs. 

Fotopic in reality had been down for a while by this time a year ago - the message found here has not changed in a year. The question is what is actually happening behind the scenes? The problem for the administrator is that most users have moved on - be it to flickr or smugmug or another photograph storing website. 

Would I go back? Well, my smugmug website is still not complete - I still haven't reuploaded everything, although I'm now just on independents, northern operators and captioning the beast. Furthermore, I did find fotopic easy to navigate on and I enjoyed using it. A few tweaks here and there and it would have been perfect for me. Also, my long dead but still stored (somewhere!) fotopic site is the only place which holds some of my images, which seemingly have been misplaced or not burnt onto disc over the years.

However, smugmug is apparently reliable at the moment. We've had one period of downtime in a year (that I've noticed), and that was only for a few hours. Furthermore, each month they are improving their service - and how they are improving their service is made obvious to you when you log on to the owner's control panel. Furthermore, smugmug is easy to customise to your own needs - it is bright and bouncy; you can have collections and groups too where on fotopic you could only have one or the other. Smugmug is also quite flexible and I like the user friendly approach. Uploading photos is also easier - but it is harder to edit them once uploaded than it ever was on fotopic. Smugmug is also cheaper for a year's subscription, if I remember right.

I think I would stay with smugmug just. However, I certainly wouldn't close my fotopic site - I would probably use it as a spin off site, if it ever came back. 

Here's hoping it is less than a year until we hear some more news...