Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board MyPhotoAlbum...going bye bye

MyPhotoAlbum.com is shutting down over the next 2 weeks. So all my 2005-2010 photos (~185 albums and thousands of photos) will be going off-line soon. I've got all the photos on my hard drive, but the easy access to a web-based system made these sorts of photo albums great.....beware of the future 'cloud systems' Anyhow, I’ll try to transfer them over to SmugMug, but it will take a huge effort and some time. I wish I had listened to RP and others to switch over to SmugMug early. Sorry for any inconvenience, Rick Graham.
Here’s the e-mail I got today…..ugh!

Dear MyPhotoAlbum User,

MyPhotoAlbum.com is closing on Tuesday May 3rd, 2011. All accounts, photos and videos will remain available until Tuesday May 31, 2011 at which time they will be deleted forever.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience but we simply cannot afford to remain in business.

We recommend that you register for an account at www.dotPhoto.com and upload your photos to that service. You can store, share and create photo products at dotPhoto.com, a great service that was founded in 1999. You can sign up for a dotPhoto.com account at https://www.dotphoto.com/JoinMPA.asp. If you are a current MyPhotoAlbum club member, enter your MyPhotoAlbum username and email address and dotPhoto will give you $10 store credit and also honor the remainder of your club membership.

Alternatively, you may also easily download all of your photos by purchasing an archive DVD. This product is normally $24.95 but we have reduced the price to our cost of $15.00 as a convenience for you. You can order your archive DVDs at http://grahamcracker.myphotoalbum.com/store.php?product=personalized_dvd

Please note, your photos will not be available as of May 31, 2011.

Sincerely,
MyPhotoAlbum Inc

I got an e-mail notification from another company a few weeks ago stating that they were "heading under." I think it was the company that originally started out as Seattle PhotoWorks. Thank goodness I only had ONE Photo on the site. Probably from having a print made.

I lost about a thousand photos from Nepal when a site failed to inform me that they didn't allow you to keep photos on their site unless you constantly placed orders thru them. I still haven't gotten over that one. (These were negatives that I had digital images made from. (BooBoo number one was not downloading the digitals from their site.) Still haven't gotten around to putting them back online.)

I feel your pain (as did a bunch of others a couple of years ago when another popular site went dark.)

I really wouldn't trust any of the free sites. (Don't know if MyPhotoAlbum.com was one of them.) They can change their terms of use at any time and you may be hozed. Flickr, Smugmug and a few others are (hopefully) here to stay.

RP, thousands of Nepal photos, ouch! That sucks

Yeah, MyPhotoAlbum was recommended by some folks where I work and it was initially a free site, but after a year or 2 they started charging an annual fee with the threat of deleting all your photos.
The devil is always in the details…..it’s $15 per DVD and all my photos will require 6 disks = $90 + $6 shipping
Getting all the backup photos is a minor hassle that I’m willing to deal with, but restoring all the photo-links to the various trip reports from over the years is above and beyond my hassle tolerance level. Sorry folks

Oh well, I'm really happy with SmugMug and hope it hangs in there and is successful in the years to come

These tales make me glad I don't use any of the photo hosting sites. I keep photos on three different hard drives (copies on each), one in the computer, one external USB and one network-attached drive. Stuff I want visible, I put up on my own web site using Jalbum to create slide shows when I'm not integrating photos into trip reports.

The web site itself is hosted by HostMonster, which isn't free, but reasonably inexpensive and seems to be reliable. If they ever go belly up, I have copies of the web site on disc at home (same deal...three copies on three separate discs plus a fourth on my laptop) and could transfer the DNS entries and reload the site in a day or two.

Such is life in the ether...gotta be prepared to pull up stakes and move at a moment's notice...fortunately, hard drives are really cheap so even having hundreds of gigs of photos isn't a big deal when terabyte hard drives are under $100 each.

Sorry to hear about that, Graham. I looked at your site, that's a lot of good work, a tremendous amount of effort.

I'm with Alan, I don't trust any of the photo-hosting sites. I come from the music business and feel the same way regarding sites that host mp3s. I don't want anyone messing with my content.

I think it may be worth the effort to build out your own website. I use some free software called Gallery: http://gallery.menalto.com/

I'm still on version two, they revved up to v3 some time ago. From what I gather, their engine was (maybe still is) used to drive the MyPhotoAlbum.com website.

I use one of the web hosts on this list: http://webhostinggeeks.com/

Most of those listed are probably fairly reliable and should have installers for Gallery (and similar software) available from their control panels. If you have problems with one host, you can copy your files, export your database and transfer everything to another host. All of the URLs to individual shots will remain intact.

I hope this may be of some help.