Fotoalbum.hu

» see fotoalbum.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 15 June 2015 fotoalbum.hu was fine. It was the largest photo host in Hungary, roughly 19 million photographs in 246,000 albums belonging to 46,000 registered users, organized under a category tree that went from Weddings to Winter Landscapes and paid for by a print-ordering business bolted onto the side. Sometime early in July the servers failed. By 1 August the entire site was one short paragraph: unreachable for technical reasons, we ask for your understanding.

It never came back. The two years that follow are a record of a company discovering, in public and in installments, that the data was not recoverable.

The domain had a long prehistory. Captures from 2003 through 2005 show a page titled ::Photoalbum:: running version 0.91a, with a note asking visitors to check back after 1 December 2002 and a parenthetical hope that development would not slip again. It did slip, for years. By October 2006 the real thing was up, with registration and a shopping basket for prints, and that is the launch the site actually had.

~ the dossier ~

~ reading it from outside ~

Hungary's web is underrepresented in this graveyard for the usual reason, that it mostly happened in Hungarian and the English-language tech press never covered any of it. What makes this one legible anyway is that the evidence is the site itself. There are four versions of the holding page, each less confident than the one before.

~ the notices ~

The sequence is readable in the Wayback Machine and it gets worse in a very particular way. On 19 September 2015 the message was long and optimistic: a server problem, the uploaded images are all available, we are constantly working on restoring data and operation, earliest expected restart 12 October 2015. On 23 October the tone changed. The new text dropped the promise that the pictures were available and added a link to the clause in the terms of service covering suspension and termination of the service.

Around 25 November it changed again, and this version is the one worth keeping. It admitted a database error and explained that without the database, matching images to their owners would be a long process. It insisted the photos were safe. Then it asked any user who wanted their pictures back to email customer service with their name, their username, their password and their album address. The address it gave was [email protected]. CEWE Hungary, the photo-printing company that owned the site, was asking 46,000 people to send their passwords in plain email because the only index of who owned what had been in the database that broke.

~ the refusal ~

In February 2016 an Archive Team volunteer wrote to CEWE offering to help: several methods of archiving the site, the group's labor, the Internet Archive's storage, and an explicit statement that the point was preservation. The reply thanked them and declined. "Nem áll módunkban a Fotoalbum.hu tartalmának ilyen módon történő archiválása" is the sentence, and even in Hungarian it sits ambiguously between unable and unwilling.

Individual users had better luck for a while. On 7 March 2016 one reported that she had reached support and received her images, all except the ones from 2015, and that she had been given until 19 April to download them. The last capture of the site, 24 September 2017, carries the final version of the notice with a new deadline: contact customer service about stuck images by 20 December 2017. After that the page stops being archived at all, and today fotoalbum.hu redirects to CEWE's photo book store.

~ what is left ~

Archive Team files the outcome as lost. About 45,000 URLs survive in the Wayback Machine against the 19 million photographs that were uploaded, which is a recovery rate of roughly two tenths of one percent, and most of those are thumbnails on index pages rather than anybody's originals.

No announcement was ever written. The closest thing to one is that sequence of holding pages, which between them are a more honest account of what happened than most companies manage on purpose.

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