PhotoWorks

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

~ the obituary ~

Film in Turkey went over a counter. You handed the roll to a shop and came back in a few days for an envelope with the prints inside and the negatives in a paper sleeve at the back. Nothing about that ritual involved the post office, and nothing about it involved a web address.

PhotoWorks was built on the opposite assumption. It started in Seattle in 1976 under the name American Passage Marketing, founded by Gilbert Scherer, and from 1978 it sold something slightly strange: 35mm motion picture film, respooled into still-camera canisters and sold cheap. Movie stock needs the ECN-2 process rather than the C-41 every corner lab ran, so the only place that could develop it was the company that sold it to you.

That was the machine. You mailed in the exposed roll, and back came prints along with a fresh unexposed roll for free. The free roll was not generosity. It was the thing that guaranteed the next envelope, and it worked well enough that by 1997 the company employed around 800 people and pushed roughly twenty miles of film a day through a single 65,000 square foot lab.

The part that makes this an internet grave came in the mid nineties, when the same envelope started coming back with a floppy disk in it.

~ the case file ~

~ pictures on disk ~

Long before a normal household owned a digital camera, PhotoWorks was scanning negatives during development and returning the results as files. First on floppy under the name Pictures On Disk, then as downloads from an online account. A partnership with AT&T WorldNet, signed in january 2000, carried the traffic.

This is worth sitting with for a second. A family in 1997 with a plastic point-and-shoot and no scanner could have their holiday photographs on the web, because the lab did the digitizing as a side effect of the developing. The company had rebranded itself around that idea by 1999, taking the PhotoWorks name and pointing everything at the website. The pipeline ran the right way round: film in the camera, and pixels on a screen without the customer touching a single piece of equipment.

~ the file format problem ~

The files were not JPEGs. PhotoWorks wrote its scans as.sfw on the disks and.pwp for the downloads, both proprietary, both readable only by the software the company shipped with them. It made perfect commercial sense in 1996 and it aged into one of the meanest traps of the era.

People still turn up on support forums holding a floppy or a folder of.sfw files with a baby in them somewhere, and no living program that will open the things. Converters exist because volunteers reverse engineered the format after the company was already dying. A lock-in that lasts eighteen months is a business decision. A lock-in that outlives the business becomes a small permanent loss, and there is no customer service department left to complain to.

~ the actual end ~

There was a lawsuit in 2000 over how the free film had been marketed, settled the following year. The deeper problem was arithmetic: every digital camera sold removed a household from the mail loop permanently, and the loop was the whole business.

American Greetings agreed to buy PhotoWorks for about 26.5 million dollars in november 2007. Film processing stopped in 2010. In april 2011 the operation closed in every form, with the customer accounts and the stored image libraries transferred to Shutterfly. What the buyer had actually wanted was the list of people who had once trusted a company with their negatives, which is a fair description of what a photo business is worth once nobody is mailing anything in.

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