PhotoPoint

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

~ the obituary ~

Nothing I owned in 2001 made a digital photograph. Film went to the shop on the corner and came back in an envelope, and the negatives went in a drawer where most of them still are. Even if I had owned a camera that produced files, a 56k line was not going to move an album anywhere, and the idea that the safest place for a picture was somebody else's hard drive would have sounded like a joke about the phone bill.

PhotoPoint was built by Pantellic Software and was online by December 1998, which is where the earliest archived copy of the front page sits. It was one of the first free photo album sites, from the window when free meant advertising plus a hope that you would order prints. It worked. By the end it was carrying more than ten million photographs for something like one point two million members, which made it one of the larger consumer sites of its type.

The ownership went in a circle. A separate American company, PhotoPoint Corp, bought the site in 1999 during the period when buying traffic was a strategy. That company failed, its assets went to an assignee handling the wind down, and on 17 July 2001 Pantellic bought its own product back out of the wreckage. Five months later Pantellic was insolvent too.

~ the case file ~

~ what people actually lost ~

On 15 December 2001 the offices closed and the staff were let go, and the site did not come back. What members had received beforehand were vague emails about technical difficulties, so a lot of people spent that winter refreshing a page and assuming it was a bad week for the servers.

The photographs were still on disks somewhere. The company had no bandwidth budget and no employees left to run a retrieval, which is why the story ended in the shape it did: a survey posted on the corpse of the site asking former members whether they would pay twenty four ninety five for a CD of their own pictures. Some people got their photos. A newspaper found a father whose only pictures of his two year old had been uploaded there, and that is the part everyone remembers, because in 1999 uploading a photo felt like putting it somewhere safer than a shoebox.

~ the lesson that did not take ~

PhotoPoint died at the front of a queue rather than at the end of one. Ofoto and Webshots and the rest of that cohort were all built on the same arrangement, where free storage of the thing you cannot replace is funded by a business that has to keep working. Kodak Gallery closed in 2012 with a migration deal. Everpix went down in 2013 after telling everyone exactly how much money it had left.

The behavior never changed. People still say backed up when they mean uploaded, and the two words have never meant the same thing. What PhotoPoint proved, before most of the world had a digital camera at all, is that a photo service is only as permanent as its worst quarter.

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