TrekEarth

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

~ the obituary ~

Adam Silverman launched TrekEarth in October 2002, widening out a site he had already been running called TrekJapan. The premise was geography. You uploaded a photograph of a place and filed it by country, and other members then told you what was wrong with it. The same person built two sister sites on the same principle, TrekNature alongside TrekLens.

It grew the way a community with a rule grows, steadily over a long time. By November 2006 it held 426,569 photographs from 41,524 members in 182 countries. By January 2008 that was 678,607 photographs and 63,302 members across 187 countries. In September 2010 it crossed a million images. Internet Brands, which by then owned a large stack of forum properties including FlyerTalk, had bought it in 2009.

Photo-critique communities were never my corner of the web. My 2000s ran through file-sharing clients and hardware forums, and the only camera in the story was whatever was welded into a phone. The reason this one is worth a grave is the ending, which is a specific kind of ending that keeps happening to archives held by companies.

~ the case file ~

~ the one-a-day rule ~

One photograph per member per day. That was the whole design decision, and every other property of the site came out of it. A daily cap means you post the best frame you have rather than the roll, which means the front page stays worth loading, which means the critiques are worth writing because the thing being critiqued took some effort.

The other requirement was text. Every upload needed a title and a short note explaining the photograph, so the archive ended up being twenty years of people describing places they had been, attached to evidence. Members could file images by theme as well as by country and build their own categories. None of this is complicated and almost nobody builds it now, because a daily limit is the opposite of what an engagement metric wants.

~ the million ~

A million photographs of the world placed on a map and described by the people who took them make a research object. Somebody in 2010 could have looked at that and seen a geocoded visual record of the planet assembled by volunteers over eight years. What Internet Brands saw was a line item running on software that would need a major upgrade to keep working, and the arithmetic came out against it.

That judgment was probably correct as a business matter. TrekEarth had gone quiet years before the end, and no effort had been put into it for a long time, which is why the shutdown notice went up for several weeks and most of the remaining members never saw it. They were not logging in often enough to find out that they needed to.

~ what was not saved ~

The Wayback Machine brackets this one to the hour. At 14:32 UTC on 28 November 2022 trekearth.com answered 200 and served its own homepage, still carrying the tagline about learning about the world through photography. By 08:50 the next morning the domain returned a 301 pointing at a FlyerTalk thread titled Welcome TrekEarth users, opened that same week by an Internet Brands administrator who wrote that they had recently and regrettably shuttered another site.

There was no export. Members went into that thread and asked for a copy of their own catalogs and were told no, and then told again that TrekEarth was gone and nothing could be retrieved from it. Twenty years of one-a-day uploads, each of them chosen carefully because the rule made you choose, went off the internet in the gap between two crawls.

The community got rehoused in a forum. The photographs did not.

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