Wednesday 9 March 2011

What is to be done?

Today, once again fotopic has gone down. Again, there is no explanation - complete silence from fotopic (or rather their "Snappy" owners) - the only bit of light coming from former owner, Joel, on the Google Group focusing on Fotopic Users. Recently:
  • Fotopic have not been replying to emails sent to management. I have myself sent many in for help when the service or the search facility has been down - not a dicky bird back.
  • Any suggestions have not had a reply - about 2 years ago I asked if they could allow us to pick the group image photo on the front page. "It will come in the next software update" I was told...
  • The search facility has been down for a month or so now (or at least it feels like it).
I am a premium user, and it feels as if I am pumping money each time I renew my membership into an empty company. As it is, the group layout is retained even if your premium expires as the settings are kept. Am I getting anything for my money? Do fotopic deserve my money? Is it really worth it? What is to be done?
  • Keep going with the site. I've got thousands of photos on there - some which are only in the darkest deepest depths of my storage CDs. It would take me an age to upload them all again - and I do generally like the fotopic layout. Shame about the management.
  • Transfer everything to my freewebs website. This would be a pain due to having to embed the photos into web pages, but freewebs is 99.9% reliable and there is always someone on the other end of the email! It would be more time consuming but far more personal.
  • Flickr- now I'm not the biggest fan of flickr - the photos are too small and I find that you lose photos in the sorting facility. Having said that, I like the intergrated nature of being able to have one photo in several sections, and it seems to be very reliable.
  • The new software from Joel - Pikfu. No idea what it will look like because it hasn't been published yet, but apparently fotopic sites will be able to be transferred over some how. An interesting development - will have to wait until it goes live.
  • Finally, keep the site dormant and move onto somewhere else with the new photos. I don't like this option but you increasingly get the feeling that one day fotopic really won't come back and all of your time and energy will be wasted.
Regardless of whether fotopic comes back on 5 minutes after this post goes live, 5 hours or 5 days, my concerns (as I'm sure many of you share) will still be there. Will fotopic go down one day never to return? It is such a shame that what was once the best way (and when working, still is in my opinion) to display your photos online has ended up like this - here's hoping the good old days come back sometime sooner rather than later.

2 comments:

  1. I'm wary about Pikfu - if Joel hadnt sold Fotopic in the first place then we wouldnt be in this mess - and how long before he gets bored with this project and decides to sell it as well. I think I'll look elsewhere.

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  2. I agree with this post, I was told the same about group images, and no replies to Emails.
    Also I don't like the layout of Flickr either, although some features are pretty cool.
    I'm going to wait until Joels new idea is published and take it from there :)

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