Kodak Gallery

» see kodakgallery.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ofoto launched in june 1999 in berkeley, california. lisa gansky and kamran mohsenin were the founders. the pitch was a clean fit for the moment. consumer digital cameras were going mainstream, but most people still wanted physical prints to put in albums or on the fridge. ofoto would let you upload your jpegs to a website and order prints in standard sizes. an envelope of glossy 4x6s would arrive in the mail a few days later. it became the canonical workflow for the suburban us household with a new digital camera.

kodak bought ofoto in may 2001 for an undisclosed sum. the financial press at the time put the deal in the $50m to $80m range. the rebrand to kodak gallery happened in 2005. by its 2008 peak the service had around 60 million registered users and was hosting billions of uploaded photos. it was running its own fulfillment and its own album-binding line, plus a steady catalog of mugs and calendars and cards that printed your photos onto various physical objects. the side businesses became most of the revenue.

kodak gallery never reached turkey at meaningful scale. printing jpegs from a us website to a us shipping address was the whole product, and the international story was always thin. in 2012 kodak filed chapter 11 bankruptcy and put the gallery up for auction as part of the wind-down. shutterfly came in with a stalking horse bid of $23.8m on 1 march 2012. on 2 july 2012 the kodak gallery site went off and account holders were migrated to shutterfly.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the model was simple. you uploaded jpegs through a web uploader. the site offered a few standard print sizes and a catalog of photo objects (canvas prints, hardcover albums, mouse pads, mugs). you ordered, it printed, it shipped. ofoto and its peers (snapfish and shutterfly the loudest among them) carved up the us household-photo-print category between them. for a window of about ten years that category mattered a lot, and ofoto was usually the largest by user count.

the second life kodak tried to build on top of the printing layer was a social one. kodak gallery added shared albums and a guest list per album you could send to relatives. flickr is what people remember from that era. kodak gallery was always one tier below flickr in cultural footprint, but a tier above in print-volume revenue.

~ the postmortem ~

two things happened at once. cameraphones replaced point-and-shoots, which moved photos to apps like instagram and facebook where the whole social loop happened on screen. and kodak the parent company spent the late 2000s losing the film business without finding a digital replacement. the gallery kept growing in user count up to 2010, but its parent was bleeding cash on every other product line. when kodak went into chapter 11 on 19 january 2012, the gallery was an asset to be sold rather than a strategy to be defended.

shutterfly's $23.8m for 60 million accounts plus the brand was a clean acquihire of the user base. shutterfly migrated everyone over and did not keep the kodak gallery brand alive. the part that hurt users was the print-product database. order histories survived the migration but the curated albums of christmas cards from 2003 did not always come across cleanly. people who had been printing yearly family albums for a decade learned that their archive was a service, not an asset.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »