Back in 2001, I created my first online photo album on a little start-up dot.com site called Ofoto.com. Ofoto was one of the first sites to offer easy online image hosting in the hope that they could make money selling hard-copy prints of digital snapshots.
Since then, I’ve used my Ofoto account intermittently to share pictures with friends and family, although I’ve never paid anything for the service or ordered any prints (I think I got some free prints when I opened the account).
However, it seems that Ofoto was swallowed up by Kodak at some point in the past, and my 8 albums with 331 pictures silently became part of Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery. I don’t remember this happening, but recently I’ve been receiving e-mail from Kodak threatening me that my albums will soon be deleted unless I don’t buy something from them:
We’ve missed you at the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. We’re happy to store all your memories, but we do ask that you make at least one purchase every 12 months to keep the images stored in your account.
Can you believe it’s been a year since you’ve made a purchase at the Gallery?
[..]
We may soon begin deleting stored images. Don’t risk losing your photos! All it takes is one purchase to renew your storage for another year.
Can you belive this disingenuous bullshit? “We’re happy to store all your memories — but we’ll happily delete them without a moment’s hesitation unless you buy something from us”!
This is particularly ironic seeing as I’ve just got back from the EVA conference at Harvard University in Boston, where a representative of Eastman Kodak Research Labs was extolling the virtues of hard-copy prints for long-term preservation, and telling us how “preserving memories” was part of Kodak’s corporate ethos.
So, go ahead and delete all my images, Kodak — I have them all on my computer anyway, and I’ll just use another image sharing service (e.g. Flickr) instead.
Awww, it turns out that Kodak DO love me after all… Here’s the message I got from them today:
“We are very happy to welcome you back to the Kodak EasyShare Gallery!
“Because you recently made a purchase, your images will not be deleted—we have extended your free Gallery storage.”
This is a little strange since I didn’t make any purchases, but I’m not complaining.