March 2010: Fotopic problems here
A major spike yesterday in google searches arriving at Omnibuses. The search term was “Fotopic problems” or similar. Omnibuses reached fourth on google and with a google headline screaming “Fotopic at Fault: a sorry tale” it’s little wonder we experienced a peak.
It turns out that there are rumours surrounding either Fotopic’s insolvency or its server has severe technical problems. If the former, an awful lot of enthusiasts are in trouble, and not just in England. Whereas we trust most will have retained duplicate copies of their photos, there’s the time and effort of uploading to Fotopic, organising sites, cataloguing, writing descriptions and so forth. Quite a few eggs in one basket, really.
If Fotopic has gone the way of Woolies, that’s something like the loss of an estimated quarter of a million bus photographs (as at November 2007). Many are simply record shots, it’s true. Some are of significant interest and many others are of historic merit. Seven of our nine 7+2 Photo Sites were Fotopic hosted.
A year ago, there were 500 sites alone belonging to Fotopic’s Busworld community. And that only scratched the surface. And don’t mention contemporary or archive rail and train Fotopic sites. Or other catalogues. A favourite of mine was a collection of images of old radios.
Flickr aside, there *are* other free photo host sites but none seems to have the flexibility of Fotopic. Plus free web hosting services. And while they all remain free, there’s always the possibility that a site will implode or suffer outages. Even the professional paid-for side of Fotopic doesn’t seem immune.
The same could easily happen at Blogger/Blogspot. That’s why I take care to back up regularly!
Saturday, 3 January 2009
Fotopic Problems or Dead?
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15 comments:
When my hard disk crashed and I lost everything I thought at least my photos were safe on Fotopic......
:(
Does anyone think fotopic may be ok if not where else can you go such a wide range of bus pics
@ Anonymous at 10:00
Flickr is by far the better service and comes as standard (free) or professional (paid for). The reason it's not as popular as Fotopic is that bus enthusiasts started using Fotopic before Flickr and once you are with something like Fotopic it's difficult and time consuming to change.
Photobucket is worth avoiding IMHO.
If you really want to be safe it's worth paying for proper server space from a good provider and creating your own web page.
Is all sorts of talk about FP. Latest I heard is its a problem with the company supplying the servers to FB called Kingstons Communications? Someone thought it would take 72 hours to sort?
There are just two many outages on FP these days. Time to search for another? Or maybe co-locate? That would be safer.
according to companies house FP went into liquidation late last year.
but why has it been online till after christmas then all of a sudden nothing
Fotopic was sold to new owners earlier this year and at that time the original Fotopic Ltd / Fotopic.Net Ltd went into liquidation, the new owner being registered as Snappy Designs Ltd and this is still active.
So i wonder if fotopic will come back or has it vanished forever
If Snappy Designs Ltd are still active, why haven't they at least posted *something*, anything on the Fotopic.net home page? Like some sort of notice "Hey guys, don't worry, tech problems, back soon on the X of January"???
the worst thing is the total silence from de fotopic headquarters
I want to know what is going on , already had many complains of different websites linking to my 22 websites hosted at fotopic.
And if its gone 5 years of work is gone , who is gonna pay for all the hours working on my sites.?
I wrote before ONE EMAIL TO YOUR CUSTOMERS is too much trouble
Before it was sold never had any problems with fotopic
must not be nice to the former owners aswell i think.
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/former-fotopic-users
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=57035335072
http://dih-itim.blogspot.com/2009/01/fotopic-disappears-but-silence-is.html
"I wrote before ONE EMAIL TO YOUR CUSTOMERS is too much trouble"
The trouble is if it is a server problem then sending an email to some 60,000 users/customers would be difficult to say the least. Likewise if it is a problem with the interface to the outside world even putting up a holding page on the home-page could be difficult.
I guess its a case of fingers crossed and wait and see. Perhaps fotopic could offer premium/plus customers who have paid for the service a extension as compensation.
If it has gone forever then it is a real shame, it was a great resource. Whilst arguably not as flexible as Flickr many users had spent a considerable amount of time organising and uploading images.
Everything seems OK now!
Business as near enough usual following this email from Fotopic. Phew.
"On Friday 2nd January 2008 photo sharing site Fotopic.net suffered a core equipment failure while upgrading the server and network capacity.
"As a result of this the fotopic.net website was unavailable from approximately 9am on Friday 2nd January.
"Despite our best efforts to resolve the situation the gallery service remained unavailable until approximately 10:30am on Monday 5th January 2008.
"As a result of this outage we are examining our hosting capability and contingency plans, but wish to assure customers that Fotopic.net
has not ceased trading and will be enhancing its services during 2009.
"No data or images have been lost during this time and all systems are back to normal.
"We apologise for the situation which was ultimately out of our control, and would like to thank customers for bearing with us.
"Best regards,
etc etc
I pulled all my own original bus, lorry and local history work off Fotopic around 18 months ago when I found my work appearing on other websites and prints of my work for sale on eBay. I replaced my content with stuff in the public domain just to keep the presence online going whilst I worked on an idiot-proof way of avoiding pirate downloads. Therefore it's no loss at all to me and all my original work exists as original photographic negative or print. I won't be uploading any of this stuff any time soon although I might recommission the darkroom and make it available in good ol' hard copy format - at an appropriate price of course. Sorry to hear about people's entire archives vanishing into the ether, but I have been saying right from the start that you need to preserve the original source in its original format, and if that be digital then you need to back up. Hey ho.
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