More news on the PhotoPoint situation! (UPDATED)
By
Mike Tomkins
(Monday, July 16, 2001 - 10:59 EDT)
A possible way to access PhotoPoint images, and more...
We continue to receive lots of email on the situation at PhotoPoint, and amongst this several Imaging Resource readers have mentioned a possible way to access some of your PhotoPoint photos, which may be useful if you had photos hosted by the site that you don't have backups of. (Always, always keep backups of your photos if they're important to you!)
Readers Ellen of American Kid Trading Company, Linda Solomon, Pamela Welborn, and Ron Smith (of conservative news forum FreeRepublic.com, where several forum threads have been following PhotoPoint's outage) all noted that some PhotoPoint galleries seem to be accessible via Epson's PhotoCenter. If you have the full URLs for your PhotoPoint images, you may be able to access them by replacing the 'albums.photopoint.com' portion of the URL with 'albums.photo.epson.com'; note that Epson's policy doesn't allow outside linking of images, so once you've got the image on your screen, you should then immediately save it to your computer (in Internet Explorer 5.50 you do this by right-clicking on the image and selecting 'Save Picture As' from the resulting menu.) Linking to the image from another site using the Epson URL will cause the image to be blocked after a few views, after which you won't be able to access it.
IR reader Andrew Murphy, meanwhile, visited Pantellic Software's Nova Scotia offices in person. Andrew writes: "I visited Pantellic's offices today, and spoke to a management sort (no name, sorry) who was at pains to tell me that they were *not* PhotoPoint (no kidding), but that they did have all the servers, the site was indeed still down, that 'his tongue was bloody' from biting it, 'he really wished he could say something', and that 'if I had anything to say, it would be that you won't have long to wait for an announcement'..." This fits in with what we're hearing that there will likely be an announcement of some kind made later today. Andrew also gave us a few images taken with his Canon EOS D30, of which we're reproducing two below that show Pantellic's reception area and the racks of servers on which (we presume) PhotoPoint images are hosted. We apologise for the image quality, but Andrew accidentally left his camera on the wrong white balance setting, and so we've had to manually attempt to correct the white balance on both photos.
Thanks to all our readers for their emails, and in particular to Andrew for sharing the photos with us!
UPDATED 2001-07-16 12:54ET: We've removed the surname of Pantellic Software's Colin S. in our previous news item, after he contacted us. Quite unbelievably, people had been calling Colin at home regarding the situation at PhotoPoint. This is clearly unacceptable, and we would ask readers please to respect Colin and his family's privacy. Colin tells us that he and his colleagues are still working to resolve the PhotoPoint issues.
In our opinion, the best thing that readers can do at the moment is to keep an eye on our news page for more news as it develops; calling PhotoPoint or Pantellic will serve no purpose other than to sap their manpower and possibly delay things even more... As we have more news to share, you will hear it on the news page!
UPDATED 2001-07-16 15:37ET: IR reader Wendy Curry tells us that the Epson PhotoCenter trick above seems to have been blocked and is no longer working. Hopefully it allowed some users to get back their valued images whilst it was working... Thanks, Wendy!
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