KodakGallery.com is holding your photos hostage. Bust them free using this. | Hacker News Reader

KodakGallery.com is holding your photos hostage. Bust them free using this.

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22 pointsrantfoil6 comments

They're well within their rights to do so (heck, everyone needs to make some money) -- but they also make it quite difficult to download these photos. If you had 200 photos, you would have to click the "Download Full Resolution" button 200 times individually. If these photos are mine, then shouldn't it be a little easier? Sorry, a product manager in some stovepiped organization said no.

I don't exactly spend that much effort making it easier for people to defeat the need to pay me money, either.

Do you think that's a good strategy for getting people to be your customers? Really?

Notice how gleeful the author was to have "defeated" the company here. Is that how you want your customers to look at your company?

Well, not to put to fine a point on it, yes, I do think that charging money to make things easier is a good strategy for getting people to be my customers. This is partially informed by the fact that I charge money for software to make things easier.

People buy because the paid version is better than the free version for their purposes. If the paid version was not better than the free version, they would not buy. There is a famous pre-Internet A/B test on shareware: functional limitations beat "put out a coin cup and hope some money falls into it" by a mile.

See: http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-people-register-...

Is that how you want your customers to look at your company?

My customers are distinguished from the poster by a few things. Principally, that they pay me money. (If my customers are looking at my company like it is a business which provides them value in return for being paid, then that is great -- we're all on the same page.)

The opinions of people who will not pay me money and are, in fact, hostile to the idea of paying money are of little concern to me. The free competitors are over yonder. They're worth what you pay for them. Enjoy.

In this case, Kodak evidently offered to store his pictures for free, then when he wanted them back because they were going to delete them, they did not make it easy to get out.

As a prospective customer, I pay attention to whether someone is going to try to get money from me for the privilege of no longer being their customer. It's not a good sign. I will probably just avoid being their customer in the first place.

If you told me up front you were going to keep the photos around for a little bit then take them down, that's all good. I don't begrudge you, your company, Kodak, or any other company for having a profit motive. It makes the world go round.

However, if in your emails you decide to extort money from me in order to retrieve my own photos (which is entirely the tone of Kodak through both their emails and their online experience when logging in) -- I want to take my business elsewhere. And I'm going to do it without clicking a download button hundreds of times.

I almost bought an archive CD for $20 plus tax/shipping. But that's absurd, for a CD-R of the photos I supposedly already own?

Might as well code up a quick script and help other people with the same problem instead.

man this is totally sweet. someone should combine this with the Posterous API and make dead simple Kodak to Posterous converter. :)

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