Shame on anyone who uses online photo sharing sites as a *permanent* storage site.

That's the part that really pisses me off. I just logged in to Kodakgallery to see if my photos were deleted. Yep, my albums were empty...BUT, I noticed on the bottom of the screen that I could see some comments left by my friends on my now-deleted albums. Curious, I clicked on them...and...I could STILL access those albums! So those bastards didn't actually delete my photos! At least not all of them! They just deleted the "albums."

(I have no relations to multipy.com. I just discovered them recently when trying to figure out how to move my Kodakgallery photos. They seem a bit buggy but not bad.)

We've been through this before and we never seem to learn...

@jdmba: It's the people just a little smarter than those who save multiples of the same names pictures all dumped in the My Photos folder...

@dave_coder: All that is completed but surprisingly I am still getting updates about my account and their service. I cannot change the email address it seems.

Sure I am dumping the emails into the spam catch but the point was how to get them to delete an account. Goatse and Tubgirl pics didn't do it so I don't know what will. Maybe posting propritary Microsoft code would...

Point is that webshots is a very garbage service if you cannot delete your account.

But then, I only have 32 selected pictures up there.

I paid the money to keep the pics for at least another year. I had to order some prints so it wasn't a big deal. That said, I keep my pics in three different places, the Kodak site, an external drive and on CD. I'm actually going through all the pics right now and saving them AGAIN on CD by year and month so I can have all pics organized. Its a hassle, but I don't want to lose 10 years worth of pictures because I was too lazy.

I've been an IT security professional and administrator for about 18 years. If you want to ensure that your digital files are safe, always keep them locally, and backup them up. Personally all of my drives are in a RAID array, and I back them up twice a week to USB drive. Never, ever trust a company or any online service as the sole storage, and remember, regardless of the terms of service, a company can change them anytime the want, and then data mine your information.

I do this too. But my photos stay on my computer and then go to my backup hard drive (eventually).

I love that little camera. It's my very first digital camera.

And that kitteh in the picture looks like my kitteh, except it has longer hair! :)

I have over 40,000 pictures. They're stored on two separate hard drives in my home (automatically synced), and a third copy is kept on a hard drive in another location. That's a safe way to backup your stuff.

FYI, you may find that when you need to use those CDs, they're useless. CD-Rs degrade over time and eventually become useless. DVD-Rs are even worse. Don't rely on writable optical media for backups. With hard drives as large as they are now, there's no reason NOT to keep a copy of everything locally.

Now, that might sound a little shortsighted, but most folks assume these remote-photo-storage services constitute a backup of their photos, so they don't bother to have their own local backups.

Not a good idea, but then, not because the person didn't take at least some measure to preserve those photos.

I just restored a bunch of photos for a guy who'd upgraded his hard drive, deleted the data and used the original drive as a secondary in his PC, then discovered to his horror that Kodak was holding his photos for ransom. I managed to get nearly all of them back (they hadn't yet been overwritten).

For the record, I used Kodak Gallery but because I'd bought things (namely a couple of mugs with my photos on them) I wasn't subject to deletion. But knowing their policy, I've decided NOT to buy from them again and will be using a different service, as soon as I can find the time to re-upload the photos somewhere else.

Whether storing stuff online is wise is beside the point. Kodak betrayed their customers.

I bailed on Kodak after they bought Ofoto which was what Kodak Photo Gallery was before.

Now- does anyone know how to get rid of a WebShots account? I deleted all my photos and tried to delete my account but there is not any way to do that nor one contact email for the "free users" to contact their administration. I even posted some classic xxx web shock photos which just got notices of inappropriate content removal but no cancellation. Right now WebShots has been hosting copyrighted Walt Disney Corporation artwork on my account with no account mis-use issues at all for about a year.

@rick_in_texas:

I should add the 28 events = 1400 pictures

Shutterfly also SUCKS. Why? I lady who takes pictures for our daughter's band put all her pictures up there. I need them for a BAND DVD (as Historian). She deleted them off her local system and I could only get them off Shutterfly...ONE AT A FREAKING TIME. They have no BATCH system. For that I recommend Picasa from Google they do have a batch mechanism.

No BATCH = SUCKS. It took me 8 hours to download 28 Band event pictures!!!

@maztec: I've been using the myriad of photo gallery creators that are available for mozilla firefox as add-ons.

Personally I no longer backup my photos and usually delete them after I post them to flickr. I have tons of photos in very big sizes - right now I have 18,000 there. I got tired of backing them up.

However every six months, through the wonderful partners with flickr, I print them all in a photo album there and about every year I order them on CD. So worst case, I could lose a few months but not everything. A CD could fall but I have the photo album worst case as well.

Click and drag, it's very simple people.

However every six months, through the wonderful partners with flickr, I print them all in a photo album there and about every year I order them on CD. So worst case, I could lose a few months but not everything.

However every six months, through the wonderful partners with flickr, I print them all in a photo album there and about every year I order them on CD. So worst case, I could lose a few months but not everything.

The photo quality is great. I don't worry about using their software to pull the photos off the camera, I just plug the camera in directly to my PC and Ubuntu pulls the photos out rather quickly. I still want to by a card reader, though, since it will be much faster in the long run.

All of that aside, what kind of idiot hosts thousands of personal images on an online service without local backup?

Get a SugarSync account, or a Flickr account. Use a back up drive. Burn DVDs. If the images/files are so important, let common sense creep into your life.

I downloaded 1,500 photos that way . .. . Easy . .. .

@Ronald Riley: My photo website will never hold my pics hostage. Why? Because it's mine.

It was a dumb move on their part though. Instead of getting $5-10/year from me, since I did order prints from time to time, they will be getting $0 and bad word-of-mouth.

But frankly, this is a hard lesson that most computer users need to learn; backup, backup, backup.

Have at least 2 and ideally 3 or more copies of your data in independent locations. For example, I keep what I consider my critical files (photography, documents, music collection) on my primary home computer, on an old computer that's also at my apartment, and on an external drive that I transfer back-and-forth from work where I store it. I sync the external drive with my primary computer every couple weeks using microsoft sync toy (free download).

I also upload all the JPGs of my photographs to flickr as I have unlimited uploads with my pro account.

It's not completely idiot-proof, but it gets me covered for the vast majority of possible scenarios where I could loose my date

Hey look! An opportunity to throw rocks at both the OP and the Corporation because they're BOTH BEING STUPID IN THE DAYLIGHT!

Kodak wins the WTF award for bad PR move. They offered storage space for things that people think they treasure only when it's lost. Apparently whoever handles IT and Legal at Kodak failed to talk to marketing.

User is an idiot. My wife has argued against using cloud-based user storage because once it's off-property it is out of your control. If the OP is depending on someone else to care about your property as much as you do, then you are being stupid.

While I have not looked at the Kodak gallery in question (or how its structured), you may want to look at DownThemAll. It's a firefox addon that allows you to manage your downloads with greater ease, including the ability to download specificied filetyples in bulk - not one at a time!

Seriously? MySpace? Take good pictures from your camera, degrade them to less than web resolution, put them in the hands of a company known for randomly deleting images and profiles, and that's the only place you have all the pictures of your baby???

Having them uploaded to a site like Kodak or Shutterfly is good as a secondary backup, but for goodness sake people, back up your photos on CDs. It costs about 10 cents for over 100 images. Less if you can burn to DVD.

But Matthew Knell is a smart cookie. He can use free web automation software, such as the Firefox iMacros add-on, to automate the process of downloading all 3,000 of his images, so that he doesn't have to whine and complain that his service, which cost him all of $0, was not designed with an easy way to download all 3,000 of his images to his computer in a single .zip file. /sarcasm ON Because, you know, it makes SOOOOOO much business sense for Kodak to make it easy for their users to switch to another online photo storage provider. /sarcasm OFF

The safe thing is to assume responsibility for your own files, and backing them up.

They did give plenty of warning, though. I've been getting the notices of file deletion for several weeks.

Or is this having regular film put on their storage?

I recognize that companies have to be lean and watch costs in difficult times, and spending money supporting millions of non-revenue generating users may seem like an ideal place to cut back. But in an age where Picasa and Flickr are expanding their functionality and free storage capacity, this is not the way to win hearts and minds and marketshare.

In 2001, I worked for a pioneering company that designed an online photo service with integrated social networking and ecommerce capabilities and begged, -begged- Kodak to partner with us. They were still convinced that digital was no threat to their film business. Oh well.

No problems Kodak, I have my original photos safely stored and backed up, and am happily sharing them via Picasa. No need to return to your rotary phone-caliber gallery.

They don't understand. Only the incriminating stuff stays online forever.

What was scarier was going to the blog and seeing that they were not the only ones who didn't have any other copies of their pics. Getting pissy over $20 to save all of your pics? Your pics obviously aren't more important than your outrage.

Before the advent of digital photography, did people hand over their photo albums to strangers and say "Hold on to this for me, won't you?"

If you're trusting some third party to care as much about your personal photos as you do, you're an idiot, frankly. Stop being lazy. Edit your collection. Store the good photos locally. Make a back up. Don't be stupid. The end.

Moral of the story here? Don't trust online digital storage to store forever.