Submitted by boydjd on Mon, 07/13/2009 - 16:27
Posted in
So, as most people know, I was one of the developers who worked on Photrade up until we ran out of money, and couldn't find anymore funding. One of the biggest things I did there was build out the YUI based photo management interfaces, and I built out the entire server infrastructure. The site has apparently been limping around with no active development since October.
To my surprise, I received this in my spam folder today:
Dear Photrade Users,
At the end of 2008 you were informed by the owners of Photrade.com that they had lost their funding and would not continue to develop the website. And at some point earlier this year, all of the full sized images that had been uploaded to Photrade were deleted. I hope you kept a backup copy of your images.
Last month, MyPhotoAlbum Inc. acquired some of the Photrade.com assets. We will be adapting some of the Photrade.com technology to enhance the MyPhotoAlbum.com service. Please note that we also own and operate dotPhoto.com.
We invite you to try the MyPhotoAlbum photo service and are pleased to offer you complimentary use of our Club Membership subscription service for one year - FREE. Simply sign up for a FREE MyPhotoAlbum account and then drop a line to our Support Team at <a href="http://support.myphotoalbum.com" title="http://support.myphotoalbum.com">http://support.myphotoalbum.com</a>, quoting reference PHOTRADE to receive your free upgrade.
Please note that we will be announcing the MyPhotoAlbum Pro Service within a month that will include all of the Photrade services and more!
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me at peter@myphotoalbum.com.
Thanks,
Peter Macnee
CEO, MyPhotoAlbum Inc.
At the end of 2008 you were informed by the owners of Photrade.com that they had lost their funding and would not continue to develop the website. And at some point earlier this year, all of the full sized images that had been uploaded to Photrade were deleted. I hope you kept a backup copy of your images.
Last month, MyPhotoAlbum Inc. acquired some of the Photrade.com assets. We will be adapting some of the Photrade.com technology to enhance the MyPhotoAlbum.com service. Please note that we also own and operate dotPhoto.com.
We invite you to try the MyPhotoAlbum photo service and are pleased to offer you complimentary use of our Club Membership subscription service for one year - FREE. Simply sign up for a FREE MyPhotoAlbum account and then drop a line to our Support Team at <a href="http://support.myphotoalbum.com" title="http://support.myphotoalbum.com">http://support.myphotoalbum.com</a>, quoting reference PHOTRADE to receive your free upgrade.
Please note that we will be announcing the MyPhotoAlbum Pro Service within a month that will include all of the Photrade services and more!
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me at peter@myphotoalbum.com.
Thanks,
Peter Macnee
CEO, MyPhotoAlbum Inc.
Well, isn't that interesting. I've never even heard of MyPhotoAlbum. Oh, and I hold equity in Photrade. But that doesn't really matter, because I'm sure any money that was made from selling off these assets went to the original investors and/or to payoff the enormous amount of debt that Photrade has racked up keeping the site running since October. Those servers at EC2 are expensive, and I was laid off before given a chance to scale back the server infrastructure to keep things afloat longer. Whoops. Brilliant move by the original investors/board of advisors/CEO. Let's lay everybody off to scale back our benefit and salary costs, but not try to scale back any other costs.
Regardless, I'm guessing the reason that MyPhotoAlbum bought "some assets" instead of the whole company, is because Photrade is probably going to file for bankruptcy, to get out of the debt that's been racked up. And nobody wants to buy debt, obviously.
Anyways, there's a particular part of the email that is interesting to me.
And at some point earlier this year, all of the full sized images that had been uploaded to Photrade were deleted. I hope you kept a backup copy of your images.
This, my friends, is completely false. All of those images are STILL there. Half a terrabyte plus of images are still laying around on EC2. They're not lost, the database isn't corrupt, the images aren't corrupt. Either somebody was lied to in this deal, somebody is dumb and doesn't know what they're talking about, or Photrade/MyPhotoAlbum doesn't feel like spending the half hour to build a script to allow Photrade users to download their original photos. Which, by the way, if Peter is reading this, I'd be more than happy to build such a script/page for free. Our users were awesome, it just sucks that the company was so horribly managed, for all parties involved.
Anyways, I sent an e-mail to Peter, no idea if he'll respond or not, letting him know that the images actually still exist at this moment. I'll probably get sued by somebody over this post, I think my NDA still applies for a few more months. But hey, I'm a poor man right now, and I think that Photrade is probably just as poor. If the company wants to sue me for some debt, awesome, I'll give it up, no problem.
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Thanks Josh
Hi Josh,
I'm the VP of Product here at MyPhotoAlbum, which basically translates into jack of all trades for all things MyPhotoAlbum. I wanted to drop you a note to thank you for emailing us about the full sized images... because of you, I'm happy to report FULL SIZED IMAGES HAVE BEEN LOCATED. Photrade did not provide us with documentation nor have they been terribly helpful. I'm thrilled that there was a miscommunication about where the full sized photos lived on Amazon, and that they were not in fact deleted – as we were told. I'm sure that the Phototrade users are happy as well.
I believe that user's data belongs to them. And personally I'd love for you to write the download page to retrieve the photos. However as you can imagine, we are currently footing the bill for the photrade user's storage & bandwidth. For that reason, we can only pay for the cost of retrieval of photos for those customers that elect to convert to the MyPhotoAlbum service, it's FREE after all.
I would like to take you up on your offer to create the "retrieve full sized images" page and I'll make the page available to all users who create a MyPhotoAlbum account, for FREE. We are not going to maintain photrade, but as we speak we're adding a lot of its features into the upcoming "MyPhotoAlbum Pro" service.
I think this solution is win-win, however I'm open to hearing other suggestions. I'm willing to work with all photrade members who would like to convert over to MyPhotoAlbum.
Thanks Again,
Jessy Hanley
Vice President, Product
MyPhotoAlbum Inc.
Thanks for your response
Thanks for your response Jessy.
I'd love to write a page for ex-photrade users to download their original photos. However, I'm not going to do that if you guys are going to require that they use your service just to recover their own property.
There's maybe 500GB of photos there ... even if EVERYONE downloaded all of their original photos, 500GB of bandwidth transferred out through Amazon costs all of $85.00. I'm not sure why $85.00 is a huge expenditure to allow users to download their own photos, even though it's unlikely that nearly that many are downloaded.
Anyways, let me know either through the blog, or, you guys have my e-mail address.
Josh
We are happy to let any Photrade users retrieve their images
Hi Josh,
We are happy to let any Photrade users retrieve their images without having to register on MyPhotoAlbum. We’re not in the business of holding people hostage. I am confident, however, that people will like our application, especially after we implement some of the technology and services from Photrade.
We’re not a big ugly corporation trying to screw users. MyPhotoAlbum is a dozen people successfully operating two online photo services. We have 1.5 million active users on our sites and I believe the majority are happy.
It stinks that the loyal phoTrade users are left out in the cold, they were evangelistic about the service and that is a GREAT thing, it should be rewarded! The "sign-up" for MyPhotoAlbum to retrieve the full sized photos is a gentle nudge to get the ex-photraders to try MyPhotoAlbum out. As a gesture of good will, they will PAY NOTHING, get a club member account and have NO OBLIGATION to use it what so ever. The only thing that we request is that they give us a shot. I think that sounds like a pretty fair deal.
Expect an email about next steps for the "download page".
Cheers,
Jessy
I hope he takes you up on your offer.
Wow. Just...wow. I've seen a few of these "insider editions" lately, and it always feels like I'm watching part of the crew that went down after the crash and figured out what happened to the Titanic.
If they did in fact lose the photos, owning up *might* save them a few users, outright lying about it is more likely to lose them users.
Brilliant move by the original investors/board of advisors/CEO. Let's lay everybody off to scale back our benefit and salary costs, but not try to scale back any other costs.
Yeah, I see way too much of this move. Business people always seem to see soft assets (the biologicals) as something they can "easily quantify" and "replace later as needed". So wrong...so very very wrong. Streamline the cogs that are actually *cogs*, not the ones who can help you do better streamlining!
I'll probably get sued by somebody over this post, I think my NDA still applies for a few more months.
Er, I don't see any real proprietary information here, other than maybe the fact that people in suits do doofy things, which is pretty much common knowledge. I hope this Peter dude takes you up on your offer and grabs your mad skillz.
Hey Catherine, Well, Peter
Hey Catherine,
Well, Peter actually did reply to my e-mail. And said that he'd forward it to his sysadmin's, but that they hadn't "seen" anything and would forward my e-mail to them.
I followed up with exact filesystem paths and IP addresses of the servers they needed to look at.
Basically, if they send out another e-mail saying oh, we recovered your photos, then it confirms suspicion #2, that somebody is just dumb and I really don't know how these guys are going to use ANY of the Photrade technology, if they can't figure out where the images are stored. I mean, there's just about zero documentation of the codebase, but it should be pretty easy to look at the database schema and figure out that the half TB directory must contain images.
Of course, if they don't provide the users with a way to recover their images, then it confirms suspicion #3, that MyPhotoAlbum.com really just doesn't give a shit about Photrade users or their content.
The fun part is, if you look at myphotoalbum.com, it looks REMARKABLY similar to a far superior service, SmugMug. Those guys really know what they're doing, and if I was a photographer, all of my stuff would be sitting at SmugMug, even if they aren't free.
Josh
It appears that Photrade also
It appears that Photrade also deleted the last 2 blog posts recently ... here they are, for posterity's sake:
From November 14, 2008
As I am sure everyone is aware, many companies have been laying off employees to conserve their resources as the economy appears to be going into a recession. Particularly notable startups from Zappos to Zivity to Mahalo have laid off large portions of their staff.
I wanted to personally let you know that Photrade has recently had to go through the same kind of downsizing. We decided internally that it makes more sense to make cuts now so we can maintain the overall service going forward. As you may or may not know, we are a venture-backed company and fund raising timeframes have lengthened.
Thus with our reduced staff, we have been overwhelmed trying to keep up the former level of customer service as well as to continue to roll out new releases for the site. We will continue to run the service and do our best to get back to your questions in a timely manner.
We deeply appreciate all that you, our loyal users, have done to evangelize Photrade and are very sorry to have to make this announcement about our service. We’re working as hard as possible to try to raise more capital so we can expand the service offering again and get back on the “fast growth” track.
If you like the service and would like to get involved in helping Photrade move forward, please email me personally at andy@photrade.com.
We will keep you informed of any changes (especially positive ones!).
Yours,
Andrew Paradies (CEO and Founder)
From December 17, 2008
As I am sure everyone is aware, many companies have been laying off employees to conserve their resources as the economy appears to be going into a recession. Particularly notable startups from Zappos to Zivity to Mahalo have laid off large portions of their staff.
I wanted to personally let you know that Photrade has recently had to go through the same kind of downsizing. We decided internally that it makes more sense to make cuts now so we can maintain the overall service going forward. As you may or may not know, we are a venture-backed company and fund raising timeframes have lengthened.
Thus with our reduced staff, we have been overwhelmed trying to keep up the former level of customer service as well as to continue to roll out new releases for the site. We will continue to run the service and do our best to get back to your questions in a timely manner.
We deeply appreciate all that you, our loyal users, have done to evangelize Photrade and are very sorry to have to make this announcement about our service. Were working as hard as possible to try to raise more capital so we can expand the service offering again and get back on the fast growth track.
If you like the service and would like to get involved in helping Photrade move forward, please email me personally at andy@photrade.com.
We will keep you informed of any changes (especially positive ones!).
Yours,
Andrew Paradies (CEO and Founder)