When was the last time you had a door slammed in your face. For me, it was this afternoon when Digital Railroad suddenly shut it’s doors. This was the short note on the Homepage, simply titled, “Final Goodbye”.
I must say that this short, nearly terse and unsympathetic move leaves a really bad taste in the mouth. Archive owners are being given maybe 24 hours worth of access to their archives, and then, most likely Poof, into cyberspace ether it all moves. Worse, many photographers, myself included, in addition to losing our annual subscription fees, are also faced with numerous unpaid sales from their Marketplace. You also have to feel bad for photo buyers who are also being left hanging in the wind. I’ve personally spoken to several buyers, including one this morning that had no clue DRR was in trouble. Many buyers are probably right in the middle of having images approved from low res comps, and now have no place to license or access Hi Res images, save many painful hours of contacting individual contributors.
And in the end, I admit, I need to eat a little crow. When PhotoShelter closed it’s stock sales Collection, I raved about how impressed I was with Digital Railroad, the confidence I had in the company founders, and the bottom line fact that I had made sales with DRR. But in retrospect, I’ve learned a number of things about DRR as the death nell sounded that left me wondering, “What the hell were they thinking?” It’s no wonder they derailed. The irony is that the money that I earned through DRR Sales will probably be given to Photoshelter as I consider whether to join their archive services.
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It is really disappointing. I just recently renewed! At least I was paid on my outstanding sales.
We have been getting a number of emails from PS – they have a way to easily migrate your collection from DRR to them via some automated FTP process, but you will probably need to act quickly.
Ron
Ron:
I’ve gotten those emails, but from what I hear, ever since midnight PST, the only thing that people were able to download was copies of a 27Kb gif that said image not available.
If I decide to go with PS, I’ll just take the time to re-upload.
I don’t trust DRR to do anything right now, and I’m still a tad bit gun-shy after PS closed their collection less than a year after it’s start. I remember the days when people said to give yourself years to make a viable business start in the stock arena.
Its been a difficult process to watch both the death of Photoshelter Collection and DRR.
I’ve been unsuccessful in migrating files from DRR to Photoshelter. I’ve been subscribing to both for sometime. I have the files to upload to Photoshelter that were on DRR, but its been demoralizing that DRR has gone into a death spiral so quickly that I couldn’t migrate my files between the services.
As to recent billing. DRR was very aggressive in automatically renewing my yearly subscription in early September. I’m not sure my subscription was up just then. I and many ASMP members were baited into subscribing to DRR with the incentive of a substantial discount for the yearly subscription. As a result I do feel DRR took advantage of that before they closed their doors. I’ve since contested the charge to my credit card. I recommend you do the same Gary. I’ve also asked the CC company to note on my account that I’ll be refusing all future charges from Digital Railroad.
With John Harrington’s blog post warning of their demise I tried to change my billing preferences but by that time it was too late. In fact DRR removed the Billing Preferences page by the time they sent out their email notification of their shutdown.
I’m also looking to fight with them for my paltry one image sale that they never paid me for back in August. Its in the hundreds of dollars and I know others that have several thousand dollar payouts that they’re waiting for. Just bad news all around.
While I’ll continue to use Photoshelter I will be exploring self hosting solutions so as to not get burned a 2nd time.