Kodak to start deleting photos unless purchases are made....

[Pamster]

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090327/ap_on_hi_te/tec_captive_photos

"On May 16, the company's Kodak Gallery online photo service will delete her picture albums unless she spends at least $4.99 by then and every year thereafter on prints and other products.

That's the new rule for people whose photos take up less than 2 gigabytes of space on Kodak's servers — enough for around 2,000 1-megabyte photos. People over that limit must spend at least $19.99 a year. And customers who signed up under the old rules won't be given a pass"

[blacbird]

The BIG lesson of all this, for everyone here who likes to store stuff on remote servers operated by somebody else, is BE DAMN CAREFUL.

caw

[Fade]

Stupid... money-hungry Kodak

The BIG lesson of all this, for everyone here who likes to store stuff on remote servers operated by somebody else, is BE DAMN CAREFUL.

I second that.

[Maryn]

I live in Kodakland, and they've laid off more than 2/3 of their workforce over the last ten years. They're not so much money-hungry as struggling to survive. They simply can't afford to give away as much as they have been. They've sold property, torn down buildings, and taken other fairly desperate measures.

Essentially, none of us can count on anybody to archive our photographs (or anything else) for free. If you want to keep it, store it yourself. You can get a might big external hard drive for under a hundred bucks.

Maryn, seeing the 27,000 people laid off from Kodak struggling, too

[blacbird]

Essentially, none of us can count on anybody to archive our photographs (or anything else) for free. If you want to keep it, store it yourself. You can get a might big external hard drive for under a hundred bucks.

Ditto this. You're just asking for trouble if you depend on people and places over which you have no control to take care of your stuff. It's like asking Bernie Madoff to take care of your money.

caw

[BenPanced]

It's a good idea to back up stuff on remote servers. But to use them as your primary storage source? Nuh-uh.

[benbradley]

Using ANY one thing as your "primary" or ONLY storage/thing is ... whatever.

I remember what was for me the Early Daze of when the Web was growing at breakneck pace (circa 1997-1999), there was something called rocketmail, you could get a forwarding email address, you@rocketmail.com, you@lawyer.com, you@engineer.com, you@cheerful.com. There were a few dozen domains to choose from and apparently you could make as many new addresses as you wanted, and each would forward to your real address. All this was "free for life" or some such. A year or two later they started charging for these addresses - you paid for it or you lost it. I think VERY few people actually did that, even though they may have given out their 'cute' address to a lot of people. Eventually it pretty much all went away, like so many "free" web services that companies tried to charge for. I think the failure corresponded roughly with the dot.bomb around y2k. The Internet is chock full of these stories.

The Moral? Which moral? For you or for the Rocketmail company? :D

[astonwest]

Just wait until they come up with their next big idea...digital cameras that take pictures which will be deleted if you don't pay a fee after 30 days.

[blacbird]

Just wait until they come up with their next big idea...digital cameras that take pictures which will be deleted if you don't pay a fee after 30 days.

Don't need to worry about this one. The digital file is out of Pandora's Box for good, can be translated into any number of formats impossible to alter. Point being, just save your damn files on a personal storage device, and worry no longer about what some big corporation might do.

caw

[Albedo]

My photos are on my HD, my old computer's HD, my external HD, burnt to DVD, on Facebook, Flickr and online file storage. Oddly I don't have a single print though.

[Fullback]

Storing up to 2,000 photos for a year for less than the cost of a Big Mac combo sounds like a good deal. I guess you've forgotten that getting 2000 photos developed from film used to cost about $750 for crappy 4x6 copies that would fade in a few years.

It's kind of like complaining about spending 42 cents to mail a letter from California to New York within a couple of days. Deliver it yourself and see how that works out for you. :poke: