Fotopedia is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Fotopedia is shutting down

blog.fotopedia.com

57 pointsuptown41 comments

Never heard of it before, but its homepage - http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/magazine has lots of great pics.

And http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/stories/CxVE4flM6pA is pretty good

This is really sad news to hear, especially after having put 6+ years into building the photo-encyclopedia and community of storytellers. But there are still other great storytelling platforms out there to give a home for Fotopedia's orphaned stories! Exposure.so focuses on photo narratives Cowbird.com is a great place for personal stories (and is funded by their community), Storehouse is good for visual storytelling on the iPad, and also the visual storytelling platform Maptia (full disclosure I'm a co-founder) at http://maptia.com – our team is already working hard to get a special import feature ready for Fotopedia storytellers – please email us at saveourstories@maptia.com if you're interested in joining our community and would like to use our import feature to preserve your stories!

Can you please provide this data to Archive.org or work with them to save this data?

According to the (brief and possibly outdated) Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotopedia they support CC licenses so that the photography can be used on e.g. Wikipedia and vice-versa.

And public posts in a public forum are usually considered fair game, especially for non-profit archives. Archive.org has a long history of legally defending this, although they do respect polite takedown requests and robots.txt. http://www.fotopedia.com/robots.txt

Already talking to Jason/ArchiveTeam about it.

Are you affiliated with the site and in a position to provide the data, or just scheming to grab as much data as possible before the site goes down?

The latter. I've already reached out on Twitter, but you know, contingency plans.

Update: ArchiveTeam is aware, pipeline is being built. Starting shortly.

Or just upload them all to Flickr/Google+ Photos for free.

These guys saw my site

http://ookaboo.com/

years ago and tried to hire me but I was too hung up in a dead end job and my general confusion at the time. It's funny to me know that after this time I have the stronger hand!

I probably lose $300 a month running Ookaboo right now, and I can afford that, but my site could use some sprucing up and more photos.

Write me or call me at +1 (607) 539 6254 if you want to see this happen.

why does it cost you so much to run this site?

It has 100GB+ of image files and handles pretty heavy traffic volume from web crawlers alone because it has something like 5 million pages covering 2 million or so data items. I need a hefty MySQL instance to back it because

(i) I need to have fast response time for the site to be usable (ii) The database is horribly bloated (maybe 80% of the table mass doesn't have to be there) (iii) The physical instance of the database isn't as optimized as it could be

An optimized system would cost a lot less to run. It's plausible that better monetization could make the site break even now, but if I could lower the cost per image by a 3x-10x factor I might be able to put more images in (there are another 50 million or so I can grab) and maybe drive up traffic but really I haven't done it because I've been pursuing other deals that have better expectation values.

Also from an ops perspective it is a wooden round, I only have to make an editorial change once a week and something goes wrong with it technologically less than once in six months. In theory I could delete a bunch of database columns and the system might keep cruising, but it might come crashing down and cost $1000's in billable time to make right.

Does anyone have the owner's contact? If so please put me in touch at tonylandis-at-gmail, I am interested in purchasing.

Wow - only 10 days notice!

That is probably a cut off of some kind. [e.g. Not enough $$ to pay for their servers]

Yeah, but this is not their data, it belongs to their users. It would have been better to communicate before now.

Better is relative. They could have just iced the site and killed their email, which i hear is not a rare course to take.

How many days notice equates to appropriate when killing the hopes and dreams of an0n users?

How about a month? How about making sure that users can log in and download their own data whenever they want, even if the rest of the site doesn't work? How about uploading public posts to the Internet Archive?

Sounds ok, but think about the pain of that for the creators? not to mention continuing costs. I do not think there is a perfect answer, but maybe the 'community' should come up with a largely agreed upon time and call it something descriptive and recognizable...

Neither of those things sounded that painful to me. I just mean you don't have to maintain the full site functionality (and associated cost), because the goal is just to make the data available.

If i had a site, and i knew people loved it, just not enough, then killing it would bring me pain. but that is emotional and subjective.

Oh sure, but imagine how all the people providing their content to your site would feel about you deleting their content!

Indeed. So there has to be a way to fairly and logically kill something someone presumably loves whilst also making sure original content is protected.

Let's get on this everyone has some spare time.

We would have loved to be able to provide a month or even more of sunset. Unfortunately, everything was tied to a complex internal schedule which shifted the sunset too much. Today is the earlier we could do and even so, we had to provision the cost of the platform to make it available "that long".

Sorry for that.

Sorry for the ignorant question, but is the notice localized and translated into other languages? You seem to have a lot of non-English-speaking contributors.

Our service supports 10 languages and every user has received an email about the shutdown in its configured language.

Better than nothing? I hate to say it, but I feel like I could slap an ad on their website/photo stories as-is, and make a decent amount of money. Not to mention, their apps. are free. I'm not sure if that would outweigh the server costs for hosting high-quality images though.

What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

>What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

Get bought by Google, Facebook or Yahoo.

Same as all consumer businesses without any monetization model whatsoever then.

It looks like they had/have an free iPhone App. Did they even try putting ads in it?

No ads or subscription options on the site either.

Never heard of it before, I do like the map feature which is showing you pictures close to your location. [0] How were they going to monetize it? I can't find any information on the site but I think exposure.co's [1] pricing is pretty good. It's pretty much the same business (I don't know about Fotopedia's story editor but the one exposure is using is amazing) and they are charging for it.

[0] http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/map

[1] https://exposure.co/

Really sad to hear about this - I love their iOS Apps, "Wild Friends" and "National Parks" in particular - beautiful photographs and I love the story telling aspect and frequent updates. I'll have to have a good look through them again before they stop functioning. Hopefully the content can be archived somehow - ideally in a way the app can access, although that's probably impossible without their help.

Those pics are beautiful and very hi-resolution. They do have a story to tell.

SmugMug may not be directly related but they make a fortune by giving sellers the options to sell live prints of their pics, paid galleries, etc. Also AdSense on free accounts cannot hurt either. I'm sure there must be a dozen different ways like this to monetize the site (unless of course the site costs a million dollar per month to run)

Hi everyone!

We wrote up a little comparison of all the Fotopedia alternatives.

You can check it out here:

https://bonjourn.al/blog/17-fotopedia-alternatives-a-short-l...

As many here never heard of it before but it looks like an awesome service and looks like they have an active community, wondering what went wrong? anybody? and again what was their monetization approach? We can all learn from that.

Real pity. I loved the beautiful photography the app provided. It made me want to travel more. Maybe they should have work with the travel industry to make bookings available. Oh well.

Would National Geographic not be interested in purchasing this and keep it alive? It would be a shame to see it disappear.

Have they tried selling prints? We also provide a photo to painting API that can be monetization for photo apps like this.

Their domain name would itself be worth quite some amount.

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