Photopoint, now FotoTime. Is this the future of all picture servers?

Who knows a good place to use like FotoTime, but without the fee?

i use fototime...... is it still free or are they charging now?

August 1, 2001

Dear FotoTime Members,

We are sending this letter to inform you about an important service change with your FotoTime account. We will continue to provide FotoAlbum free of charge; however, beginning August 1, 2001, we will be adding a fee for storing your pictures on the FotoTime website.

The base price for storage will be less than $2.00/month ($23.95/year). This amount allows us to continue to provide the high level of service you have come to enjoy, while remaining competitive with other photo sharing sites. In order to provide enough time for you to decide whether FotoTime is the best photo-sharing solution for you, we are providing a 30-day grace period before your pictures will be removed. Additionally, new FotoTime customers will receive a free 30-day trial period to evaluate our service.

By changing to a subscription site, FotoTime will be able to continue to provide superior long-term solutions for organizing, viewing and sharing your pictures. We are planning new and exciting features to ensure we reach our goal of becoming not only the easiest and best, but your photo-sharing choice.

It has been the explosive growth we have experienced in the last six months that is forcing us to change our business model. It was always our intent that sales from merchandise would provide the funds to support FotoTime’s growth. Unfortunately, sales have not been able to keep up with FotoTime’s increasing popularity and additional storage costs. We have also decided to continue our policy of not pursuing banner advertising due to the low advertising rates and the distraction it causes to your photo sharing experience.

We are just as passionate about our business now as when we started the company over two years ago. Our goal has always been to provide superior software and services with great customer support. We are financially sound and privately financed with no debt, ensuring a long-term focus while providing great flexibility.

We will provide free upgrades to FotoAlbum and continue with our plans for enhancing the integration of our website and FotoAlbum. For a summary of these plans, please refer to: http://www.fototime.com/pages/FuturePlans.

We hope you understand our position and will choose to continue being a FotoTime customer. If you wish to subscribe, you can view additional details at: http://www.fototime.com/pages/subscribe.

If you choose to not continue using FotoTime as your photo-sharing solution, you can find additional resources on how best to retrieve your albums and close your account at http://www.fototime.com/pages/RetrievePics.

Sincerely,

The FotoTime Team

yup, i just read that other post.... those bastards!!!!!

Other post.....did I start an already existing thread?

yeah gosh, I find it absolutely horrible that a company will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars programming software, millions of dollars on servers on bandwidth, and then get so greedy as to start requesting something in return like $20/year!

yup mattadams you said it damn greedy b@$tards!

i might be able to get some pics up at my simshack.com site. but i need to talk to my web administrator. lemme talk to him and then maybe you guys can upload stuff. right now i cant get the web ftp to login

Oh well, there goes FotoTime. Unfortunately though, Matt's correct. These are businesses and they're not apt to give you something for free forever. Still, it was nice while it lasted - so was Napster... ;)

WinMx...

I have been using the msn communities area for picture sharing. Lots of space and its free. I have a hotmail account, which gives you a passport account. The passport account give you a free "community" where you can store quite a few pics. I think is 30 mb...not sure how much space. But if your interested, check it out:

MSN (http://www.msn.com) :p

(keep in mind that I don't think they will "host" pics, but you can have them out there and post a link to them)

Originally posted by FitzMatt
Photopoint, now FotoTime. Is this the future of all picture servers?

Who knows a good place to use like FotoTime, but without the fee?

Why do you expect a domain owner to offer FREE web space to anyone?

As a webmaster for many sites, I am fully aware of the cost involved in a site.

You can obtain your own web space from many hosts for about $20 per month, Look around. Get your own domain name too.

Good luck........

I always thought a web site's main pulling power to get more people was the fact that it is free. I don't mind sites with advertisement bard at the top (like this one) because I know the advertisers are paying my fee. By making a web site like FotoTime free (which is what it started out as, just like PhotoPoint), a large crowd is attracted to the site. Because of the large crowd, advertisers want to get their product/web site out to people and will pay to have their name put at the top of a page, keeping our bills down, as well as the webmaster's. Everybody wins: we get free service, the web site still makes money, and the advertisers get exposure:).

This might be a dumb idea, but is there anyway(even if it costs a fee) to be able to host pics on this site? That way, we could do something like an elite explorer, then have a certain amount of space, which could be alphabetized and would have a huge explorerforum gallery. I would rather pay Rick and company, and have a less complex setup than have all these features like ordering prints that I would never use.

Ok Tek guys, tear me apart, or compliment my idea. I''m ready for it.

why dont you guys sign up for a free web page at like angelfire or something. its so much easier to store pics like that and just run links to em rather than deal with a setup like fototime or whatever and pay for it.

i jsut put all my pics in my web server at school (we get 50 megs free)

or you guys could even use freedrive.com (they give ya 10 megs free i think, and just setup an acct that you only store pics in, and you wouldnt mind giving out a public password to it.

so many options....i would never pay for a pic hosting service, they must be joking - they only get customers who dont know any better....like paying napster nowadays - a joke.

Just remember that nothing is ever totally free anymore. Free is just an attraction until a later date. You get what you pay for, usually. If you pay nothing, you will end up with nothing.

Originally posted by Frisckey1
Matt's right

Man, its great hearing that sometimes... LOL j/k

Personally, I'd avoid Microsoft anything (MSN, Hotmail, Frontpage, WinCEMENT) Remember, the lastest virus/internet worm has been *Microsoft* based, and they aren't fessing up to the problems they created. Think about it - a monopoly is trying to get even more personal information from you, control what you see on the Internet, restrict what programs you use, and even more importantly, doesn't give a damn about your security, privacy, or you.

You can get a free, 25mb website from www.rockcrawler.com. The only major restrictions I can find are:

1) Banner ads, except you can pay to get rid of them.
2) You can't link from outside to pics.

Hosting a website is expensive, hard to do. Esp. with all the 13year old script kiddies out there, having hormone problems and deciding to take it out on *your* web server. I can understand why Photopoint, Fototime are charging now - the market crashed, the ad revenue sucks, and too many people are still looking for handouts. But, I considered their sites to suck too - too long to down pages, too much glitz, too much dependence on javascript/java/flash. (I could never Xing to work with anything on my linux box - it was soo microsoft explorer dependent it was useless to me.)

Folks, the simpler you can make your web pages, the more likely you'll get someone to stay and veiw it. I leave a page if it hasn't downloaded in less than 30seconds, unless there's something I really, really, really want to see there.

Ok, that's my tirade.. any raves on my rants are gladly excepted.

I agree with Tom and Matt. What is sooooo dang hard about using your own ISP for uploading photos? I used to do that to store all my pics. 5mb can go a LONG ways on a server. It only costs minumal to get more space too. Photoworks, and fototime are a pia if you ask me. To view photos anyways.

ofoto.com - free sharing and you can buy hi-res digital photos, frames, etc..

heck... www.rachshack.net - $10 a month for 100mb. Get a domain name over at 123cheapdomain.com and your set... Youve got your own websitel, and dang, 100mb is a lot of space for hosting pictures.
--bryan
PS - of course you could just become elite and get your space here to store pictures!

Everyone,

Sign up for an account on Superford.org

You can upload pictures, sound, and video.

You can upload 1 file at a time for free, with an unlimited amount of pictures, sounds, anv video that you want. Or you can pay the yearly membership fee and get a few extra features.

I highly recommend them!

http://www.explorer4x4.com/elite.html

Right here under your nose.