Yandex.Fotki

» see fotki.yandex.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Russia is the next country over and the Russian web was a separate internet. From Ankara you could see Runet the way you see a building across a courtyard: obviously there, obviously busy, running on services almost nobody outside it held an account with. Yandex.Fotki was one of those. It was a large photo host for eleven years, and if you did not read Cyrillic you never once landed on it by accident.

It opened in April 2007, back when a photo host was still a category rather than a feature of something else. You uploaded and got a public page at your own address. Other people commented on what you put up and rated it, and there was a front page of whatever the service reckoned was interesting that day, which mattered a lot to the photographers who used the place seriously.

The decade it covered is the decade its job disappeared. In 2007 a photograph needed somewhere to live before it could be linked anywhere at all, which is the only reason photo hosts existed. By 2017 the phone was uploading by itself to a cloud drive nobody thought of as a website, and the sharing happened inside whatever app the other person was already sitting in.

~ the case file ~

~ what a photo host was for ~

Fotki was built for a web made of forums and blogs, where you needed a URL for an image before you could put it anywhere. It carried the apparatus of that world, with the EXIF on display and the geotags on a map, and underneath it a community that argued about photographs in the comments.

That apparatus is exactly what the social networks removed. VKontakte and Instagram took the picture and put it in a feed where it lived for a day, with the metadata stripped on the way in. The photographers who cared about the metadata stayed on Fotki, and there were not enough of them.

~ the numbers yandex published ~

When Yandex announced the closure on 7 March 2018 it did the thing companies rarely do, which is publish the number that made the decision. Five percent of the people holding a Fotki account had opened it in the previous six months. Yandex Disk, the company's cloud drive, was taking a hundred times more photo uploads than Fotki was.

Both halves matter. The first says the service was empty, and the second says the pictures had not gone anywhere at all, they had only moved to a product with no comment section and no front page, one that did not think of itself as a photo site.

~ the move to disk ~

The site closed to the public on 27 April 2018 and the photos were moved rather than deleted. Every account's pictures went into a folder on Yandex Disk with the album structure and the sharing permissions carried across, and the old links kept resolving. The storage did not eat anyone's free quota either: Yandex measured what each account was using on 6 March and granted that much space on top of what they already had.

This is the part to say plainly, because the file here is mostly full of the other kind. A company under no obligation to anybody spent engineering time making sure eleven years of other people's photographs survived the closing of the product they were sitting in. Most of these graves end with a date and a 404.

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