In 2006, I signed up for fotki.com – a great service at the time. For a small yearly fee of $30, they offered unlimited storage capacity for photo galleries, and provided an alternative solution to all-too-common Flickr and Picasa. I loved the interface and the amount of control over the galleries I had, so I gladly became a premium member for $30 a year.
Over time I’ve accumulated a considerable amount of photos on the site (about 2.7Gb), some of the pictures being originals uploaded to the site. Nothing spectacular, just a lot of my snapshot-taking.
Fast-forward to 2013 when I started considering moving all of my galleries to a different platform – the look and feel of fotki platform has gone stale over 6 years and hadn’t really been updated, nor did it have integration with mobile and interoperability with other services. At that point, in April, a friend of mine who also was using fotki for a while forwarded me an email he received from them in 2012 declaring that to deal with the rising costs, they are forced to introduce a new level of membership that would have “FTP Access to your originals”. So, in essence, they decided to cut off FTP access to the originals I’ve uploaded to their “unlimited storage” hosting, until I pay them for a new level of membership.
That left me a little annoyed, – I can understand that small businesses have to deal with rising costs, and I honestly would have paid an increased membership, but positioning it as a new level and cutting out my access to my uploaded photos rather than to new galleries – that’s a little too much. At this point, however, I’ve already found a suitable replacement – smugmug.com and was ready to move on. So, I paid the additional $30 for Premium Gold membership – if anything to just get my photos out.
After downloading all of the galleries, something odd attracted my attention – the total size of the downloaded folders was just over 200 Mbs, meanwhile the amount of storage used on the server was 2.7 Gbs. When I contacted their support, they explained that not all of the originals were online because they were affected by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and had to move to a different datacenter, and that the remaining originals will be back online “in a few weeks”. When, in my opinion, reasonably I asked for a refund for my just paid Premium Gold membership, I was told that they “don’t offer refunds”!
I’m not going to post what I think of them. One simple fact – I contacted their support in April 2013. It’s been 4 months and during this time nothing has changed. Every time they get back to me, it’s “a few weeks” and “few more weeks”. I’m about to close the account, giving up on some of my originals.
Final Thoughts: It’s really sad to see a good business gone bad. I’m not sure what happened – maybe they didn’t scale up to make the numbers work, maybe they changed management (I haven’t really looked through their blog – it now starts to show errors left and right, so something tells me the infrastructure is about to go). I am certainly left with a bad aftertaste and feeling cheated by what originally was a good and promising service. Bye-bye, fotki.com!