PhotoCenter: Has the PhotoPoint link been cut?
By
Mike Tomkins
(Monday, January 7, 2002 - 14:21 EST)
Epson's online photo-sharing site is back online ahead of schedule; reader email suggests it may still be hosted in the same place...
IR reader Thomas C. Grozan dropped us an email over the weekend to note that Epson's PhotoCenter website, previously hosted by Pantellic Software in the same location as the now-defunct PhotoPoint website, is now back online. Epson took the site offline on December 20th shortly after Pantellic/PhotoPoint disappeared, and at the time promised it would return to service by January 10th...
With the PhotoCenter site back online, Thomas noted that whilst he can't find any references to Pantellic / PhotoPoint any more, the 'Terms and Conditions' page states that "This Site is controlled and operated from the Province of Nova Scotia, Canada"... It is possible that this is just a hold-over from the old site which Epson missed changing, but it does also seem to suggest that Epson may have arranged to take over the equipment that Pantellic previously ran on its behalf.
PhotoPoint users, meanwhile, still have been offered no chance to retrieve their images - and look unlikely to ever see them again. There does seem to be a moral to this story - choose your photo hosts carefully! Hosts linked to major digital imaging players such as Epson, Kodak, Sony and the suchlike would seem to have better odds of survival if for no other reason than that these companies see them as important offerings to attract buyers to their hardware (and potentially build revenue streams from printing in the future). This being the case, they're likely to channel money from their other businesses to help sustain their photo-hosting sites.
As can be seen in this case, PhotoPoint has vanished without a word from parent company Pantellic to either customers or the media, whilst Epson announced the reason for PhotoCenter's outage immediately, gave a date for the site's return and actually beat that prediction by several days...
We have pointed this out before though, and it bears repeating - there is no better way of ensuring you're safe from the volatile photo-hosting marketplace than to keep backups of all your images. You may still lose the time you spend in uploading and captioning your work, but at least you'll be *able* to replicate it if you keep backups of everything...
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