Goodnight PhotoSite

While I've never gone all the way through the process of selling a business, I approximated that experience in 2005 when we decided to sell our PhotoSite division to United Online.  Thus it was particularly upsetting when I received (along with about 700,000 other PhotoSite users) an email announcing that UOL was shutting down PhotoSite at the end of September. 

I was so bummed about it that I composed a song for the Homestead talent show entitled Ain't No More Photosite to the tune of Pink Houses by John Mellencamp.  I tried to make it funny but it turned out just sounding depressing.  When I think of the literally thousands of hours we all spent making that product the best photo sharing product on the market (if I do say so myself), it's hard not to be depressed.

The moral in this story?  Sometimes you make the right business decision on paper but you can never predict all of the ramifications.  I would probably still make the same decision today given the same situation that we faced two years ago, but I wish I had given more thought to this scenario.  There were two scenarios that I thought were the most likely outcomes: 1) PhotoSite would explode in growth, and we would regret having sold it; or 2) PhotoSite's growth would stagnate due to market conditions or poor handling, and it might meet an untimely death.  I just never thought #1 would lead to #2 (PhotoSite grew about 400% in the 2 years after we sold it).

I have no other great insights here, except to say that I'm very sorry to all of my fellow PhotoSite users for the trauma of potentially losing the online photo collections we all spent so many hours meticulously crafting. 

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PHOTOSITE USERS:

For those of you who don't find Snapfish adequate for your photo-sharing needs, you might consider SmugMug as an alternative.  Note that SmugMug is not free, but they have offered to give all PhotoSite customers a 50% first-year discount (use the discount code photosite when signing up).  We always felt that SmugMug was the best competitor to PhotoSite, and they have continued to innovate and improve in the past two years.  They seem to run an impressive operation.  For what it's worth, I have decided to move my 6000+ family photo collection there. 

Smugmug is working on a migrator that will automatically grab all of your photos from your PhotoSite account, but it won't be ready until October.  Note that this will still work until June 2008, even though your PhotoSite will no longer be viewable to the public after September 27th. 

In the meantime, a PhotoSite fan wrote a program that you can run on the computer you have PhotoSite installed on, and it will upload all of your photos to a SmugMug account.  Many folks have already used it successfully, and it has the big advantage of moving all of your high resolution photos from your computer, even if you never uploaded them to your PhotoSite.  Just be warned that a) the interface isn't very pretty and b)it can take a long time if your Internet connect is slow (mine took over 24 hours). 

Click here to install the PSmugMug Migrator application.  When prompted, you'll need to hit "Run" twice in a row, and then you should be able to launch the application from your desktop.  Please read the instructions carefully on the first screen that appears.  Also note that you will need to create a trial account at SmugMug (no credit card required) before you begin.  If you can't get this to work, just wait until the official SmugMug migrator is finished (I'll post instructions on my blog when it's ready).

Long live PhotoSite.

--jsk