Glorious NSE Posted March 11, 2011 Share Posted March 11, 2011 what I liked about it You too? I have to keep telling myself to talk about it in the present tense! It's not gone yet, at least officially. Whilst to some extent I agree as I said, I'm not sure I can be (or want to be!) "responsible" for what the UK railfan community does. And to my mind there is definately a good case at the moment for that community to not have "all it's eggs in one basket", no matter how convenient it may appear. The present angst in various places sorta points to just how much would be lost (even if just temporarily) if it all just went. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted March 11, 2011 Share Posted March 11, 2011 'Tis all very well saying 'just move your images' etc but my Fotopic site has/ had(?) over 1400 images From memory my count was over 16000....trust me when I say this isn't something i'm approaching lightly! The prospect as you say of having to do a forced move later on if it just dissapears for good is much worse though. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timara Posted March 11, 2011 Share Posted March 11, 2011 Hate to say it guys, but going on what I've seen from a few reliable sources, the current owners of Fotopic (Snappy Designs) would "appear" to have gone bust. Much as I hope it's untrue, I like most people am fearing the worst. To say it's a right old pain in the bum is putting it mildly! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
45669 Posted March 11, 2011 Share Posted March 11, 2011 From memory my count was over 16000....trust me when I say this isn't something i'm approaching lightly! The prospect as you say of having to do a forced move later on if it just dissapears for good is much worse though. I've only got a mere 8,000 pix on Fotopic, but the thought of having to re-upload them elsewhere is mind-boggling to say the least. Would I even live long enough to do it?! Although I've got the originals of all the pictures I haven't, unfortunately, got all the captions. It's only relatively recently that I started doing those on the word processor and then copy and pasting them onto the caption box on Fotopic. Regardless of that, I have, on and off, today been playing with Flickr. I didn't used to like it, but with a bit of practice I'm getting used to it. The main problem that I have not overcome is that the pictures in the Photostream are in no particular order - not even the order that I uploaded them. Unless anyone knows better, the only way that I can see would be to upload them one at a time, and in reverse order. Having said that, I have managed to get the pictures in the sets in the the right order, and I have found a way of arranging the sets, so I'm making progress! If anyone is interested to see my efforts so far, here's the link : http://www.flickr.com/photos/40052043@N03/ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taigatrommel Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 Following Martyn's lead, I'm giving Smugmug a try. I guess a few galleries need to be up before it's possible to comment on what the search feature is like, but it looks pretty tidy and is easy to use. http://richardsrailways.smugmug.com/ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold Oldddudders Posted March 12, 2011 RMweb Gold Share Posted March 12, 2011 Regardless of that, I have, on and off, today been playing with Flickr. I didn't used to like it, but with a bit of practice I'm getting used to it. The main problem that I have not overcome is that the pictures in the Photostream are in no particular order - not even the order that I uploaded them. Unless anyone knows better, the only way that I can see would be to upload them one at a time, and in reverse order. Having said that, I have managed to get the pictures in the sets in the the right order, and I have found a way of arranging the sets, so I'm making progress! If anyone is interested to see my efforts so far, here's the link : http://www.flickr.com/photos/40052043@N03/ My only comment, other than utter sympathy for all such fotopic victims, is to note, Ron, that your pics are available to be downloaded by anyone, which is very generous but not always the preferred setting for people with large collections. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
hmrspaul Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 'Tis all very well saying 'just move your images' etc but my Fotopic site has/ had(?) over 1400 images and stacks and stacks of carefully captioned info which would be lost forever if Fotopic disappeared. I wouldn't want to go through the whole process again - no way! Maybe that would be the time to hang up the cameras for good and give this digital malarky a very wide berth... Dudley http://www.dudleys-photos.co.uk Dudley, I may join you! I have 20K photos just about railways (the Mostly Autumn collection is far more important to me!). I was already annoyed by another aspect of electronic media. As some may have noticed I gave up posting for a while because I used a Microsoft photo editor that Microsoft refuse (despite moans all over the web) to support or make a work around to get it to work on Vista. So when my older computer died so did this. The replacement I am using is dreadful in comparison. But at least I put the information I want to present on the photographs - not as comments - so they can be uploaded relatively easily again if necessary. But the links, comments by others etc. will all be lost. For most Fotopic users this is much more difficult. If it does come back on there is a way of retrieving all of the content which was made available by the original owner of Fotopic. Mind, even that has not worked for me recently! Perhaps the lesson is to forget all this temporary digital stuff and get back to hard publishing, but the likelihood of much detailed stuff being available is very slim! I should have known better - through work I've been aware that keeping any digital records readable for more than about 10 years is very expensive - who of you remember punch cards, replaced by magnetic tape or punch tape, replaced by drum drives, 8 inch discs, 5inch discs, hard discs (my present Dell computer which cost c £1K cannot read these! but can read 4 types of flash discs)..... Paul Bartlett - off to get a life. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 A useful "state of play" message from the Google site (I stress again that this isn't official communication from Fotopic) as of about 9pm last night. I thought it might be useful to summarise what we actually know that's relevant to the current outage. This is particularly for the large number of new members that have joined in the last few days and therefore aren't aware of discussions that have taken place in the past. 1. Fotopic went into administration back in 2007 or 2008 and was sold by Joel Rowbottom , the creator of Fotopic, to Snappy Designs. Consequently Fotopic as a company no longer exists - searches on the net will tell you that but it isn't the cause of the present issue. 2. A lengthy outage took place in January 2009 and was the reason I set up this group, initially to look at what we could do given the apparent collapse of Fotopic. In this instance it turned out to be a major technical problem which also coincided with the New Year holiday. The problem was fixed and things returned to normal. Then, as now, there was a lot of rumour spread about and the way the net works is that rumours soon apparently confirm themselves as they do a loop and come back from a seemingly independent source - so take care! 3. Joel Rowbottom considered it necessary to put out this statement in January 2009. It's not really affecting what happens at the moment but may help some understand: http://blog.joel.co.uk/?itemid=777 (this has been posted in a recent message as well) 4. Since that outage we have become aware of a complete lack of communication from Fotopic and basically it ran on autopilot with nodevelopment, no attempt at marketing or anything. 5. More recently the servers were moved from their Yorkshire base down south. Whilst there was some disruption during the transfer, things still worked. 6. Joel Rowbottom made us aware of a tool for backing up our galleries, a need that had become painfully obvious since the January 2009 outage. Quite a few of us took advantage of it and some backed up more often than others. This tool is still available and those who need it can be pointed in the right direction if the option of using it again should arise - i.e. Fotopic comes back on stream. 7. A recent issue has been the system grinding to a halt around midnight and apparently shutting down completely in the wee small hours (UK time) but I never experienced the latter for myself. 8. There have been issues with counters and search engines but I think they're a sideshow and are not relevant at the moment. 9. Joel is now at the final stages of launching a new photo hosting package which will probably (I know little detail) be significantly different from Fotopic in some functionality as it takes account of the way people network nowadays which has changed significantly from when Fotopic was launched. This site is www.pikfu.com, something to which there has been a lot of reference in recent discussions. It is now being launched in something of a hurry to fill the void and will only have limited functionality to start with. 10. Joel knows no more than we do so there's no point in keep asking him! Even if he really does and isn't telling, asking once more isn't going to make a difference. 11. We haven't a clue what's going on at the moment. Hopefully this sums up where we are at the moment - if I've forgotten any facts (not rumours or opinions) then they should be added so new members know the full picture. Managed to squeeze this in between the tide of new membership requests and first message approvals.... Regards, David Beilby Ref the previous posts on here about depth of coverage of images, Joel posted an amusing message that the original fotopic party trick was to get visitors to take a note of the train they arrived on, then they would look and see how many images of it were online...made me smile anyway! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
45669 Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 My only comment, other than utter sympathy for all such fotopic victims, is to note, Ron, that your pics are available to be downloaded by anyone, which is very generous but not always the preferred setting for people with large collections. There is a way to make them non right-clickable, but I have yet to find it. It might only be available to those who pay to use the site; I'm only using the free one at the moment. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
45669 Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 A useful "state of play" message from the Google site (I stress again that this isn't official communication from Fotopic) as of about 9pm last night. Ref the previous posts on here about depth of coverage of images, Joel posted an amusing message that the original fotopic party trick was to get visitors to take a note of the train they arrived on, then they would look and see how many images of it were online...made me smile anyway! One of the posters on the Google Forum says that Fotopic will be off until, probably, Monday. Whether this is insider information or simply speculation, he doesn't say. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
LiCo Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 Hello everybody. I'm new here and just signed in the forum to follow the news about fotopic outage. I'm from Brasil and have (hope I still have) 2 galleries with about 5 or 6,000 pics. See u Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 One of the posters on the Google Forum says that Fotopic will be off until, probably, Monday. Whether this is insider information or simply speculation, he doesn't say. I suspect speculation, I doubt they will fix whatever it is over the weekend. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
hmrspaul Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 Dear all Fotopic owners A useful advisory from the yahoo forum is that the cache of your site is available - search for the site on google and then look at the cache when google offers this to you. Takes a while to load (well mine does) but once it comes up cut and paste the text to a word file. Thus all the text on your front page is saved. Other cached items can be similarly found and saved - such as the comments left by other people. Not much, but quite a lot if you have already saved your photographs. Paul Bartlett Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Delamar Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 another thing about flickr is the search, and the fact theres more non railway stuff on there, how many times have you done a simple search and for it to come up with plenty of shots of weddings or sunday league football matches. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Butler Henderson Posted March 12, 2011 Share Posted March 12, 2011 Anyone else thinking Microsofts next generation of operating system storing all of your documents etc on the internet is one well worth avoiding. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium spamcan61 Posted March 12, 2011 RMweb Premium Share Posted March 12, 2011 Anyone else thinking Microsofts next generation of operating system storing all of your documents etc on the internet is one well worth avoiding. Well they're already encouraging you to use their cloud by offering 25GB free storage:- http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive Not much use as a Fotopic replacement but I've started using it as an extra backup for my photos. No way would I use cloud based storage as my primary backup though. Edit: I'm surprised Murdoch hasn't sued over the term 'SkyDrive'... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold martin_wynne Posted March 12, 2011 RMweb Gold Share Posted March 12, 2011 One obvious way to safeguard your online pics is to host them yourself. A standard hosting package from Jim at Data 1 Systems (hosting provider for RMweb) costs about £40 annually or about £4 monthly ($60, $6, no vat because it is in the USA). That's not much more than buying a monthly mag. If you go for the annual option Jim will register the domain name for you free. That's a full-feature package with cPanel controls. 1GB of web space -- enough for about 10,000 web-quality images. There are lots of free Gallery scripts available, which are commonly used by professional photographers. Such as Coppermine TinyWebGallery Piwigo Pixelpost ZenPhoto phpAlbum 4images Here's one such site at random using ZenPhoto (free): http://southwestphot...lery/landscapes That would make a very attractive personal railway gallery site. regards, Martin. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Depot Posted March 13, 2011 Share Posted March 13, 2011 Here's one such site at random using ZenPhoto (free): http://southwestphot...lery/landscapes That would make a very attractive personal railway gallery site. regards, Martin. Just had a look and very good, but is there any option to add text to the photo's I wonder? cheers Keith Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium PhilJ W Posted March 13, 2011 RMweb Premium Share Posted March 13, 2011 I have read on another forum that Fotopic has gone into receivership and is unlikely to be back soon if ever. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold beast66606 Posted March 13, 2011 RMweb Gold Share Posted March 13, 2011 I have read on another forum that Fotopic has gone into receivership and is unlikely to be back soon if ever. Fotopic doesn't actually exist, so that would be a good trick - Snappy Designs, the parent company have not lodged any bankruptcy "paperwork" so the thought is it's a technical rather than financial problem. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
karabuni Posted March 13, 2011 Share Posted March 13, 2011 Dear all Fotopic owners A useful advisory from the yahoo forum is that the cache of your site is available - search for the site on google and then look at the cache when google offers this to you. Takes a while to load (well mine does) but once it comes up cut and paste the text to a word file. Thus all the text on your front page is saved. Other cached items can be similarly found and saved - such as the comments left by other people. Not much, but quite a lot if you have already saved your photographs. Paul Bartlett "Takes a while to load..." - so it does! Unfortunately, Google doesn't cache the "style" of pages (perhaps a copyright "issue"), so there aren't any images. The Wayback Machine located in Egypt does store pages as they appeared when archived, but don't include all images. This is probably timing out when crawling pages, as HMRSPaul"s front page has only a couple of images stored, whereas some other pages have all the thumbnails present. For gallery6801 they have 2124 urls stored (pages), but if I remember correctly hasn't been archived since 2009. Link: Internet archive Put in address of site to see what's stored, in the search box. Links work to stored pages, rather than as with Google to the actual site, but only if they're stored. Mostly useful for retrieving text from fotopic pages. Some pages are stored as pdfs e.g. p3171473.pdf, in which case they do have the image, but everyone with fotopic pages will still have the images, won't they? There are various ways of making your own photo site, but some apps produce pages that can be very tedious if you want to edit or add pictures to a page later on. Google's Picasa might be useful, but I've never used it to make web photopages, so don't know if it's any good for that. Plugins for jQuery produce excellent results, but only if you're willing to do hand coding. Slimbox is fairly simple - you can see this on the Cambrian Models' "archive" photo pages. This one looks promising, but I haven't used it: Exposure for jQuery Both these are Open source (free). Barry Cambrian Models. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold DaveF Posted March 13, 2011 RMweb Gold Share Posted March 13, 2011 "Takes a while to load..." - so it does! Unfortunately, Google doesn't cache the "style" of pages (perhaps a copyright "issue"), so there aren't any images. Barry Cambrian Models. Perhaps I've just been lucky, but I have been able to get my gallery front pages from Google cache, with most of the thumbnails, I also managed to get all but one sheet of comments the same way. I captured from the screen using the "Snipping Tool" in Vista. I have always printed off a reference copy of each collection's thumbnails after uploading them. Fortunately a little while ago I had downloaded everything from my site, including captions so if I need to put them somewhere else "all" I need to do is upload the images (which already have the place name as a part of the filename) and copy and paste the captions. If the worst comes to the worst the downloads and also the original files I uploaded exist on 3 hard drives at home. I did this because I know how easily software/hardware problems and server issues can wipe out months of the work I am paid for in another context! But no matter how prepared you are it will be an enormous amount of work for every user if fotopic does not return. David Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
298 Posted March 13, 2011 Share Posted March 13, 2011 And to my mind there is definately a good case at the moment for that community to not have "all it's eggs in one basket", no matter how convenient it may appear. The present angst in various places sorta points to just how much would be lost (even if just temporarily) if it all just went. Haven't we been through this a few years ago with a certain D&E yahoo group....? (!) Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Etched Pixels Posted March 13, 2011 Share Posted March 13, 2011 One of the long term implications if the fotopic albums do disappear will be that the many fotopic photo's linked to in forums like this one will also go down. Or get all the images replaced with junk advertising pictures or porn. Quite a few people would buy the domain for such purposes if it ever came up for sale ! Something else to remember before panic sets in however is this. Even if they have gone bang the huge size of the collection and userbase would almost certainly mean that someone would buy it lock stock and barrel from the receiver, someone like Google or Yahoo would probably love to pick it up. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium spamcan61 Posted March 13, 2011 RMweb Premium Share Posted March 13, 2011 Haven't we been through this a few years ago with a certain D&E yahoo group....? (!) Yeah, I'm getting flashbacks to the D&EToddlers hissy fit as well... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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