Photo site Digital Railroad derailed completely
If my eyes serve me right, you are gone.
If the news about bank collapses hasn't devastated you enough, I have another depressing one. This time it comes from the Internet, but is no less devastating for a good number of people, hopefully not including you.
As of Wednesday, if you go to the Web site of Digital Railroad you will be greeted with this:
To our valued Members and Partners:
We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.
On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to close all operations.
Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.
Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years.
The once popular Web site, where professional photographers archived and sold their photos, is now gone, completely. As it turned out, at about 5 p.m. EDT on Monday, the Web site alerted existing customers about the shutdown and gave them a 24-hour window to download their photo archive. However, just about 10 hours after the alert, the site was shut down completely.
It's unclear now if customers can still somehow retrieve their photo archive or will get money back for the undelivered services.
In the meantime, PhotoShelter is offering Digital Railroad customers a special offer--three month's credit for their Digital Railroad account. The offer is set to expire November 4.
Take the offer or not, but definitely take this as lesson that you can't rely 100 percent on online archiving services. It's best to keep a copy of your data offline as well.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
In some ways, they had overkill on the software allowing the uploading and editing of work that was best done on one's own machine and backed up there. I hope too many people didn't rely upon the archiving and keywording their images just at DRR!
Luckily for me and several other contributors I've talked with, we edited, captioned and keyworded our own images before uploading them to DRR. We all backed up these images to DVD and external drives, thank goodness!
Sure, we're out the time it took to process and upload, but we're lucky. A few years ago, one publisher went kaput, locking the doors and shafted us for images he published and used. If it wasn't for a couple of concerned editors sneaking in after hours to grab the images and getting them back to us, our original film would have been irreparably lost...
All told, between me and three or four colleagues, we had probably more than 20,000 images at DRR. I was seeing income this year from my library, finally making my efforts pay off.
What we'll all miss is an easy and structured way to create light boxes for our clients and the Marketplace sales that helped us pay the hosting fee along the way. It was a fairly easy way to work with high-res images and image delivery that didn't require us to be web-heads.
Too bad someone can't come in and just take it over and save countless hours for all of us and make it a win-win for all... The concept was great and died before its time.
Two weeks after Nightingale walked in, everyone was gone, with no severance. Customers were left high and dry. Nightingale principals were enjoying steak and martinis in their suite at the San Jose Fairmont every night for months as they parceled out what remained of our company.
When Nightingale was hired, here's what our company's CEO had to say: ""I am delighted that the Board has made this decision and look forward to working in partnership with Kevin to help ***com preserve the inherent value in its leading ***** technology and network."
As I said, two weeks later, no one had a job or any severance. Customers who used our product daily to conduct business and make their incomes had no advance warning.
This is how modern, private businesses die - beholden to all stakeholders except the people they went into business to "serve" - their customers.
If you still have images up there, I would try getting around the front page and logging in...
They also have plans in the future to start a stock photography part of Smugmug.
I know a company that has a good piece of image library software ? they do footage libraries too.
Big advantage is that you?ll own the software; I hear they are offering credit terms too.
Take a look at http://www.big-easy-footage-library-software.com and http://big-easy-image-library-software.com
- by tomekiii December 10, 2008 5:36 AM PST
- Dear user of Digital Railroad,
- Reply to this comment
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