Sony ImageStation

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

~ the obituary ~

imagestation never reached me. by the time i had a digital camera in 2004 it was an olympus and the bundled cd pointed at a kodak service nobody used either. the path you took to imagestation specifically was that you bought a sony cybershot, opened the box, ran the bundled cd-rom, and clicked through a registration screen that uploaded your photos to imagestation.com. cybershots were not the cameras my friends bought. the people with cybershots in 2003 ankara were on yahoo or kullanici.com and definitely not on a sony portal nobody had heard of.

the service launched in november 1997 as a joint venture between sony electronics and a company called photonet. the early product was a prints-by-mail service with a thin web front-end that let you ship a roll of 35mm film to a sony lab and get the scans back as a private album. by 2001 it had pivoted to digital uploads and become the default landing page for cybershot software. the peak years sat in the 2003-to-2005 window when most sony digital camera buyers had a free imagestation account whether they wanted one or not.

the market sorted itself out fast. shutterfly took the print-and-ship tier with about a third of the market and kodak easyshare gallery sat in second. flickr arrived in february 2004 and pulled the share-with-strangers crowd into a service that did not also try to sell you eight-by-tens. imagestation finished outside the leaders on every axis. sony did not put marketing behind it because the strategy was hardware first and software as a giveaway to keep camera customers in the ecosystem.

the shutdown was a sony reorganization. on september 17 2007 sony posted a notice on imagestation.com saying the service would close because the company was refocusing on core businesses. uploads and prints died on november 12 2007. you had until february 1 2008 to log in and download what you had stored. after that the servers were turned off and the remaining photos deleted. sony partnered with shutterfly to migrate accounts. most imagestation customers had stopped using the service years before and the migration tool ran on a small subset of the registered base.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

imagestation was the photo-side parallel to sony connect on the music side. both products started in the 1997-to-2002 window as sony's attempt to control the software experience that came with sony hardware, and both lost to flickr-and-itunes-class competitors that had no hardware tie-in and treated content portability as a feature instead of a leak.

the bundling was the funny part. you could not really avoid imagestation if you bought a cybershot. the supplied software (sony picture utility, later sony imaging edge) defaulted to opening imagestation in a browser on first launch. the registration screen was opt-out via a small checkbox most users missed. by 2005 sony had several million imagestation accounts on paper. the number of accounts that ever uploaded a second photo was much smaller.

~ what really happened ~

sony shut down sony connect in august 2007 to refocus the music strategy on itunes-compatible walkmans. imagestation followed six weeks later as the second leg of the same restructuring. the september 17 announcement gave users 137 days to retrieve content before the data was deleted. that window was long by web-shutdown standards (kodak gallery and yahoo photos both gave shorter notice in their later shutdowns). nobody complained because there was no audience left to complain.

the gawker post the week of the announcement was titled "few tears shed for sony's imagestation." the comments were people listing other photo services they had moved off years before. the most-quoted reply was from a user who said they had forgotten the account existed until the shutdown email arrived. the shutdown was less a death than a notification that an old account on an old service was about to be deleted.

~ what carried over ~

imagestation had no successor at sony. the cybershot bundled software stopped pointing at any web service after 2008 and the camera customers were left to upload to whatever they wanted. by then most of them were on flickr or facebook anyway. the imagestation domain redirected to sonystyle for a few years and then to a generic sony support page. the corporate strategy of bundling photo services with cameras had been a sony invention that everyone copied and that sony itself abandoned.

the photonet partner went through its own dissolution around the same period. the joint venture had been one of the early experiments in pairing a film-lab company with a consumer-electronics brand and the model did not survive the digital-to-digital transition. by the late 2000s photo services were a flickr question or a facebook upload question. the sony-imagestation arrangement belonged to the era when the camera company thought it could still own the path from capture to print.

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