Digital Railroad

» see digitalrailroad.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Before the middle of the decade a working photographer's archive lived on drives under a desk and on shelves of burned discs, and selling out of it meant knowing an editor who would pick up the phone. Digital Railroad was founded in 2003 and launched the year after, built by Evan Nisselson to put the archive on the network and the sales on top of it. You uploaded your take and tagged it, buyers at newspapers and magazines searched across the whole pool, and the licensing went through DRR.

The scale was serious for the era. Around three thousand professional photographers and eighty agencies in as many countries were on it, moving something like ten to twenty thousand fifty megabyte files a day, which in 2007 meant real hardware in a real building rather than a line item at a cloud provider. The business got to roughly three million dollars in recurring revenue and raised a ten million dollar Series B in February 2007 behind a London venture firm.

Then the credit markets closed. On 15 October 2008, two weeks after the worst of the crash, DRR emailed members to say it had cut staff and was looking hard for financing or a partner. Thirteen days later it emailed again to say the search had failed.

I have never been a working photographer and have never had a career's worth of frames sitting on somebody else's disk. What I recognize from the engineering side is the other half of this story, which is a vendor that had quietly become the only copy without anyone deciding that it should be.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the october ~

The 28 October message opened with the past tense. "We're sorry to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down," it read, and gave members roughly a day to retrieve their work. That set off a scramble that photography blogs covered in near real time, because a day is not enough time to pull down a professional archive over a 2008 connection, and DRR had disabled FTP transfers out of the system, so the only route left was the web interface one file at a time.

The servers stayed alive past the first deadline and the cutoff moved to 11:59 PM on Friday 31 October. The notice that replaced the site is dated that day and signed on behalf of the liquidator. It says the company can no longer keep the servers operational given its cash position, that the website will close as early as midnight, and that the images on those servers will be inaccessible.

~ what photographers lost ~

Two different things, and the second one hurt longer. The archives were the visible loss, recoverable for anyone who had kept originals at home and gone for anyone who had not. The quieter loss was money: sales had been transacted through DRR's marketplace, and photographers with outstanding balances joined the creditor queue behind everyone else. One photographer told A Photo Editor he was owed over twenty thousand dollars. Some people were also still inside subscription renewals they had paid for weeks earlier.

~ the letter of intent ~

The closing notice carries an odd paragraph of hope. It announces a letter of intent to buy DRR's hardware and software, from a company it describes without naming: a twenty year fixture in the industry running a multi-agency marketplace of more than twenty five million images and news stories, licensing to five thousand customers. The images, it promised, would be preserved on the existing hardware, and the buyer would contact owners about what to do with them.

Everything practical in that notice points somewhere less reassuring. Claims went to Digital Railroad, Inc, care of Diablo Management Group, at an address in Livermore, California, and members were told to check the liquidator's website for updates. That is the part of the page that turned out to be load bearing.

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