Snapjoy

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

~ the last words ~

On June 22, 2013, a post went up on the Snapjoy blog under the title "Snapjoy is Closing." It said that as of that morning no more photos could be imported and the iPhone app was no longer available. Everything already uploaded would stay downloadable until July 24, after which, in the post's own words, all photos and data would be permanently deleted. It was signed "The Snapjoy team." Six months earlier the same blog had announced that the team was joining Dropbox.

Snapjoy was a photo library that lived in a browser and did the filing for you. You pointed it at iPhoto or at a folder of JPEGs and it pulled everything in, read the EXIF out of each file, and built a timeline you could scroll back through. There was a Mac uploader called Shoebox and a Windows one after it. The company came out of Y Combinator's summer 2011 batch and opened its public beta on August 8 that year, with a launch post explaining that the project had already been going for two years before anyone outside could sign up.

The opening week was the best week it ever had. A blog post on August 16, 2011 was titled "100 hours, 1,000,000 photos" and reported that uploads had come in so fast the team closed signups to keep the servers standing. Dropbox bought the company on December 19, 2012. The announcement said the team was joining Dropbox to work on photos and that existing accounts would keep working. New signups closed the same day.

~ the record ~

~ the acquihire ~

What Dropbox had bought was the filing engine and the people who wrote it. In April 2014, ten months after Snapjoy's servers went quiet, Dropbox shipped Carousel, a phone app that did to your camera roll roughly what Snapjoy had done to your uploads. Much of the engineering behind it came from the Snapjoy side. Carousel lasted until March 2016 and has its own grave here.

Snapjoy's own users were not part of that plan. The accounts that had been promised continuity in December got a month's notice in June, and the continuity turned out to mean the service would not be switched off the same week as the deal. Six months is not nothing. It is also not what people hear when an acquirer says your account will keep working.

~ thirty-two days ~

Snapjoy never had a Turkish user base worth measuring. It shipped with importers aimed at iPhoto and Flickr, into a year when the default photo workflow around me was still a memory card emptied by hand into a folder on the desktop, with the camera's own filenames left on everything. What travels across that gap is the deadline rather than the product. Thirty-two days to move an entire archive out of somebody else's database, announced by email in the middle of summer, is a number chosen by the people switching it off rather than by the people who have to act on it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Ewan Spence wrote a piece in Forbes two days after the announcement arguing that Snapjoy's closure was a reminder to take responsibility for your own data. That was the standard reading at the time and it was the correct one. The photos themselves were fine, assuming you read the email, found the export page, and had somewhere to put several gigabytes of zip files before the 24th.

snapjoy.com still resolves. It serves a dark page with the orange script wordmark across the middle and the single word "Closed" underneath. There is no date on it and no forwarding address. The logo at the top of this grave came off that page, where it sits encoded directly into the HTML as base64, which is the only reason it survived thirteen years of nobody paying an image host.

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