It’s sad news that Digital Railroad is shutting its doors. They were good people who meant well. Unfortunately, I don’t think they focused on the right people. They paid a lot of attention to photographers, but not as much (at least it looked like it from the outside!) to the photo-buyers. I had to use the DRR interface twice to judge the APA contest and both times it was awkward and confusing to build a lightbox, order the images in the box, etc. I’m no technical geek, but I’m not a total n00b either. I had concerns about that and when I was approached by them personally about my advocation for Livebooks, I told them I didn’t think that they were in the same department as LB. To me, as an end-user like a photo-buyer, DRR was a stock image library system company whereas Livebooks is a website design company.
Maybe, technically, DRR was superior to anything out there, but it looked less than slick. I think that bit them in the butt a lot. Image counts for a hell of a lot in this industry.
But, as I said earlier, the people meant well and were sincere in their desire to help photographers. I hope they manage to shut down with grace and without screwing over those who stuck with them to the end. And I hope all the DRR people land on their feet.
*****UPDATE: Apparently my hopes aren’t gonna happen. They’re shutting down their servers in less than 24 hours and seriously screwing their clients. Note I didn’t write “ex-clients” because the photographers have the expectation of being active clients until they get their files moved.
Shame on DRR for acting like this–it shows a totally self-centered way of thinking. Okay, so your company is eff’ed, that doesn’t mean you need to drag others down on your way out.
haha, you said ‘n00b’
😀
Rocksteady,
Danno~
Your hopes indeed will not happen. I have been trying to retrieve my files and move them to Photoshelter for two days (I do have my own backup). It is a clusterf**k!
I, too, have been trying to remove images from the DRR Marketplace so that I could delete them from my DRR archives. I continually get a “error: image removal pending from Marketplace” message each time. Until images are removed from Marketplace, it is impossible to delete them for your archive. What a clusterf$ck.
Fortunately, I have all my work backed up and accessible in other forms. The DRR experience has tainted my view of all online storage services. I’m just worried about the distribution of any work left on those servers once the hardware is auctioned off and lands in the hands of unknown others.
These guys apparently had $20 million is venture capital to start up and keep running. I’ve also read that they were doing over $1 million in annual billings. How could things have gone so wrong?
One bright light in this entire mess… I just got off the phone with my credit card company, the card that was auto-billed in August for another full year of DRR membership. The credit card company was able to immediately issue a full credit for that august billing to DRR.
I know this is little compensation to those of you with huge amounts of data stored on DRR servers and no other form of back-up. Still, those of you recently billed for DRR membership renewal, I suggest you call your credit card companies and attempt to do the same.
Good luck…