Comments on: Don’t risk losing your photos!

By: brinking - nabeel hyatt

brinking - nabeel hyatt — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 02:05:25 +0000

Three signs that your “free” service isn’t going to work out…

I’ve been meaning to write about the outrageous email I got from Ofoto/Kodak EasyShare Gallery recently. If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, we all need to be very careful of the free services we decide to invest our time in using. I thought I hea…

By: lantzilla

lantzilla — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 18:24:46 +0000

In addition to Flickr, I also burn iPhoto DVDs of annual photo sets. Discs for 2001, 2002, 2003, and so on. I make four copies of each year. One stays at my house, one stays in my disaster kit, one stays at my dad’s, and one stays at my mother in law’s. I’m thinking of getting a RAID drive at home to store the disk images just in case. Actually, now that I think about it, I could probably send one to my friend Linc in NC. I know, it’s insane; but then again, I’m insane, so it works out quite nicely.

By: natek

natek — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:44:18 +0000

You make good points Steve. Thanks for the comment.

They might not make money off me this week or this year, but if they are my treasure chest then me or my grandkids will want to print/use them someday.

I encourage online companies to think long term. Online, and online storage is here to stay as far as I can tell. Quick-buck thinking should be balanced with long-haul thinking. The term “lock in” is a good one when you think about safe long-term online storage. As you say, “who wants to go to the trouble of moving all your photos”?

That said, in an age when switching costs are dwindling, and customer relationships are key, “hard feelings” have real costs to companies.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

By: Steve C

Steve C — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:32:31 +0000

It seems to me Kodak understands exactly what you’re saying, they’re just taking a different business route than you or I would like. I believe they wouldn’t be threatening to delete your photos if they didn’t understand the value of them — in fact, I’d guess they believe they’ve got you by the balls and can squeeze purchases out of you every 12 months to maintain your irreplacable treasures, because they ARE irreplacable treasures. After all, who wants to go the trouble of moving all your photos to another service if you just have to make a small purchase every year to maintain them? Good for business, bad for customer relations…

Playing devil’s advocate – the value proposition for you is to have your photos backed up as you mention, but what’s the value for them if you’re not buying anything? Even an old, established company like Kodak can go out of business if they’re not selling anything… it seems to me that if the value proposition is unbalanced in your favor, they need to find a way to balance the equation.

Unfortunately they’re willing to balance the equation by ending the relationship, rather than pushing creative ways to make money off your collection (selling prints to others, selling you a Pro account like Flickr, etc?) The only attempt they’re making is asking (strongarming?) you to buy something, and if that fails letting you walk away with hard feelings… and that to me is a big mistake.

By: BenJ

BenJ — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 21:44:54 +0000

This has reminded me — I’ve been thinking about getting a separate Flickr Pro account just to archive all my photos (the ones that I don’t really feel like sharing in my regular Flickr account).

$25 a year for piece of mind (and something like 10Gb of photos?) is probably worth it, eh?