I’ve just been told by an ex-user that Fotopic.net has unexpectedly sprung into life.

I still get a few of ex-Fotopic users come via this blog asking about recovering their images and because I am not involved any more in the slightest and have no control over any of the systems nor access to anything any more (that bit deliberately in bold), all I can do is point them at the company who acquired the assets.

It looks like very recently Fotopic.net started redirecting to Photo-Organizer.com, a domain owned by the same company who acquired those assets. They state “a facility is now available here for you to view and download your pictures hosted on Fotopic”. It seems to only apply to users whose name begins with A for the moment but this is a promising development and very useful for anyone who still hasn’t managed to retrieve their photos.

Big caveat just in case you didn’t get it the first time round: This is NOTHING to do with me, I haven’t got any other insight, this is purely an informational post. I’m as surprised as you are. Please don’t waste your time asking me anything about it.

However, if you’re after your Fotopic images, go give it a shot over at http://fotopic.net, I guess you’ve got nothing to lose so spread the word…

Edit: I have been beseiged by a steady stream of users who have forgotten their usernames, emails, passwords and all that sort of thing. I don’t have access to the database or anything else – the website itself has a statement and suggests if you have problems then to contact them. Why not try that?

Edit 2: There appear to be quite a few users who have had varying levels of success over on RMweb – they may be able to help in working out support as well.

One of the little bits I wrote on our own photo gallery was a ‘random picture’ box. Given there’s almost 50,000 photos on there now you can get some interesting bits and bobs but one which made me think “crumbs, that was the heyday” was this photo when we sponsored a racing car a few years back.

I really hope it gets better.

Since Fotopic had its “time off” in early January there’s been quite a lot of speculation on what mine and Nicky’s relationship is with Fotopic.net, so perhaps it’s time for a statement…

Fotopic.net is now owned by Snappy Designs, a company in which neither myself nor Nicky have any share interest or directorships (although I think the domain is still on one of my servers). We aren’t employees, but we have helped out a bit when they’ve been unable to do stuff or have been confused about how things work (because after all Fotopic is a complex beast).

Right now Nicky works elsewhere, and I’m an IT consultant working with 4 other companies (none of which are related to Fotopic.net or Snappy Designs). If you want to know who’s involved in Snappy I’d suggest you go pull the Companies House file.

Although I’ve lurked on the Former Fotopic Users group over at Google and provided helpful (I think) information where possible, I’ve found myself in a position where to continue to do so attracts unwanted attention from undesirables.

This means that if you need Fotopic.net assistance, I’m probably unable to help at the moment (not to mention being unwilling to help if you bombard me with emails, threats, or hostile communications). I would suggest you email the role account help@fotopic.net where there is now a support team who I’m sure will be able to help with genuine queries, and a software development team who are working on the system now.

(Footnote: I got some really nice emails when trying to sort out the FUD in the outage, and lots of nice Fotopic.net users bought me virtual beers. It’s just sad when a few bad apples spoil the whole batch.)

Thanks for your understanding.

Last Saturday we had a bit of ‘fun’ at Fotopic.net involving our hosting provider (Kingston Communications/Kcom/Affiniti) dropping the whole network off the map. A few friends/engineers tried to mitigate the effects by doing some fancy routing but to no avail really. Problems occurred up to about 10pm, and then on Sunday there were odd outages while they presumably fixed the issues.

We’ve not had an explanation but this morning an article popped up on The Register.

This is to add to the aircon failures, a total power failure in Angel Court (Leeds) which left us with two dead servers, and a broken floor in the datacentre where I fell through and gashed my leg on a ventilation tile. We got sod all explanation or service credits for those either.

I wrote a little proglet to back up your Fotopic.net gallery tonight, complete with collection story and all the photo descriptions in a sensible format.

Mac and Windows downloads available here.

One of the more popular bits of Fotopic is the Photo Of The Day, which gets syndicated all over the place (even on the front of the my.aol.com site!). We get stacks of submissions, and the official “rules” are a good guideline for what we will and won’t accept – but there’s also a few unwritten rules

Since most PotD requests come directly to me, here’s what I tend to choose and not choose:

• Please for the love of Christ, make it a good quality photo. I frequently reject blurred shots, terrible ‘family snaps’, weird ratios, pics with borders, pics with watermarks (which Fotopic hasn’t applied – we can remove FP-applied ones), or just purely bad photos.
• On the ‘weird ratio’ thing, the PotD gets syndicated and most of those sites like landscape shots. Anything not in-ratio will get cropped, so if you’ve got portrait or panoramic shots they simply won’t work.
• Make sure you’ve got copyright. Thankfully I don’t get as many screencaps but nothing’s more likely to get someone jump on us than putting pics of the latest CSI up there. Don’t try and be sneaky either, Nicky’s a CSI guru.
• We get tons (and I mean tons) of transport pics. Buses, trains, planes, trams, cars… you name it we’ve got it. Consequently we get lots submitted to PotD, and unless it’s a really nice shot you’ve got shedloads of competition. Therefore I’m unlikely to let your mobile-phone pic of a Deltic or an Arriva bus through.
• It’s not just about the photo – if your photo site uses copious amounts of weird Java, <marquee>, <blink> or has a brain-burstingly horrid backdrop I’ll probably hit CTRL-W faster than you can say ‘aargh my eyes’.
• Suggest a date for it – if you really want to get in, submit some Christmas photos for December, or some nice beach pics for August – extra points if it’s for a special day (such as St Patricks or St George’s day). Photos in context of the date are the ones we’re most likely to put online, to be frank.
• We don’t accept photos from other photo sites, so stop trying. You know who you are.

And finally, if you see a PotD which I’ve taken it’s probably because I’m running low on decent submissions!

We’ve just started accepting PayPal for Fotopic prints and gifts from the Fotopic Print Shop. Hurrah!

For Easter weekend we’re doing two separate offers:

• Friday/Saturday: Half-price on a year’s Fotopic Plus subscription – it’s just £10 for a year’s sub
• Sunday/Monday: Cheap prints (cheapest is less than half-price) on 6″x4″, 6″x4.5″, 7″x5″ and 8″x6″ (plus free postage if you spend more than £20). More about our print service here, hand produced by vestal virgins (well, almost) in the Fotopic workshop on our chunky Agfa d-Lab.2.

Subs wll extend renewals if you’re already at that subs level, and prints are usually dispatched same/next working day if ordered by 3pm.

So, er, go buy stuff

A while back I was fiddling with time-based collages using Fotopic galleries. On a similar principle I’ve wanted to do a random thumbnail collage generator for a while and finally hacked it together earlier last weekend in a quiet hour.

The script takes a print size (say, 6″x4″) at 300dpi, and plots 1″ square thumbnails on it using random photos from your Fotopic gallery. That was good – it worked as I wanted it to, and led to some refinements including using the new Fotopic2 tagging system (which you can see on my test gallery here).

I ended up with some interesting ones (warning, the 18″x12″ ones are about 4M apiece):

• Clarence Music Festival on 6″x4″.
• There’s a larger Clarence one on 18″x12″.
• Ones from O’Donoghues on 18″x12″.
• My London gallery yielded this one on 18″x12″.

I tried it with some of Fotopic’s more, er, “flesh toned” galleries (yes they exist, no I’m not giving you a list) and the result was pretty spectacular!

I’ll release a tool to generate these at some point in the next few days hopefully but it depends on $contract and whether I get time to make it resilient against abuse.