Staring Down the Barrel of a (Hot Glue) Gun

Sometimes your mind can be so open that your brain falls out.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Fuck You, Kodak Gallery

Boy, live and learn.

After Mags was born, I used the now defunct Ofoto to post all of her baby pictures so I could share them with my family and friends. Eventually other pictures of mine started making their way up there as well, and it soon became my only online picture sharing capability. Eventually I started taking less and less pictures of Mags (much trickier once they can a ctually MOVE,) and I learned of the wonders of Flickr, which had a lot of new and better features than Kodak, most noticeably that you didn't have to sign in every single time you wanted to look at pictures.

Kodak slipped out of mind for me.

However recently I've been getting notices from Kodak that they were changing their policies and would now be charging an annual storage fee for pictures, and if you did not pay all of your existing albums would be deleted. A few years ago our hard drive crashed and I lost more pictures than I can think about without becoming physically ill (honeymoon, crosscountry airplane trip), and I leapt back to Kodak to re-download all the pictures I had previously uploaded. Well you know what? You can't actually redownload your own pictures. Nuh-uh! I mean, not without paying EXTRA, anyhow. Well, fuck? Oh, I know, I'll just order a CD of the pictures I know I don't have on my current drive (the really old ones.) Nope, sorry, can't do that either. If you want the CD, you have to order absolutely everything you ever uploaded.

I beg your pardon? I have nearly 4000 photos there!! 2/3s of which I still have on my harddrive!!

But my hands are tied. I can either lose all of Mags' baby pictures, or I can pay $100 to get them all in my hands. No contest really. My CD should be here in about a week.

I'm glad since starting Flickr I still keep the original copy of all my images on my harddrive here. Its a great way to share stuff, but I'm NEVER going to hand all my images over to someone else again, at least not to a service that is going to charge me to have access to my own data, anyhow.

Fuck you very much, Kodak. I hope you tank.

3 Comments:

At 6:50 AM, Anonymous Three Eyed Toad said...

Right there with ya. MamaZ just went the through the exercise of getting all her pics from Kodak Klusterf&ck, with the same restrictions. Even more retarded is they'll burn your pics on MANY CDs, instead of just a few DVDs. The only up side is you'll have all yer photos archived to (reasonably reliable) optical media.

 
At 4:58 PM, Anonymous zombiegrrrl said...

Well, if you just want a few of them you can "upgrade" your account for like $3 per month or something then download them individually. If you have more than say a couple of dozen of photos you want to save, though, this process will be terribly painful and you should just order the CDs.

 
At 3:24 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I lost all my pictures also, Their e-mails were getting caught in my spam filter and boom all photos gone! I will deter anyone and everyone form using Kodak (which was cool when it was Ofoto). Kinda like a house fire! It's all about money well I'll spend mine on a RAID array and tape backups for all my new photos and run my own damn website for those I want to share! FU Kodak!

 

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