Come over from the Dark Side
For all you Kodak refugees who are reeling from Kodak’s change of policy, requiring increased purchases of merchandise to continue getting “free” storage, Phanfare welcomes you into the light with fullsize images supported by the Phanfare-to-Kodak importer. To Kodak’s credit, they made fullsize images available to all members, recognizing that if they planned on deleting all their photos, it might be nice to offer to give them back.
Here is a snippit of the note that Kodak sent to their “customers.”
My belief is that free archival sharing paid for by merchandise sales just does not work economically. Most stuff is printed within days of being uploaded, but the job of holding it online goes on indefinitely.
Kodak agrees with my view, as they know require ever greater purchases in order to get the “free” storage. In my book, that’s not free storage.
Storage in exchange for printing does not align the interests of the customer (better online display and presentation) with the interests of the company (more printed merchandise sold).
I expect every single site that offers free archival unlimited storage to eventually back off that policy. It is really just a matter of time. The inevitable decline of dead tree-based merchandise in favor of online sharing will only exacerbate the problem for them.
Here is a news flash that everyone in the industry knows but consumers seem oblivious to: online storage is expensive. It is not equivalent to offline storage. Only one component of online storage is disk (2 or 3 copies of each object). The other components are power and real-estate, and in the long term, neither of these decrease in cost.
In any event, if you are unhappy with Kodak and want to come to a world of full screen slideshows, archival sharing and hi-def video, then sign up for Phanfare and transfer over your Kodak stuff before they delete it.
