dotPhoto Deletes Your Photo Albums Without Warning
Jun 12th, 2009 by Johnny
My wife and I have been a dotPhoto customer since they opened their business to the online public, so say about 8+ years now. Everything from them has been great (excluding the last several months). Print quality was consistent between batches, priced competitively (not the cheapest), and quick delivery from NJ. The added bonuses was that they allowed professional (and semi-professional, like myself) photographers have a site where you can sell your prints and make a profit. It wasn’t until recently that I started to check that “pro” feature out.
However, with their recent merger or acquisition by MyPhotoAlbum, things have really gone down the drain, to the point where I would say dotPhoto reliability actually sucks! It appears that since the merger or acquisition, their policies have changed and so have the customer service (or lack thereof). Guess that all happened (unannounced) sometime in 2008, because service was still good back in 2007.
The reliability of retaining my digital content is important to us, so we no longer recommend dotPhoto to anyone. Not even for casual fun family and friends photos. Not unless you don’t care that they can disappear in a few hours.
So, this is what happened to me in the last 24 hours is inexcusable for an online Internet company. I logged into my dotPhoto account, all of my original albums were there (some dating back a few years). I went ahead and uploaded 2 new albums, totaling about 1500+ photos. It took several hours to upload. It completed without any errors and I was able to view the albums. Several hours later, I log back into my account. Surprise! All the albums have been deleted except for the first of the two new album that I uploaded. Even the most recent uploaded album was deleted. WTF?!
- Calling their customer service number use to get you a live person (I would say pre-2008). Today, you get a voice prompts that leads you into a mailbox with a message that says “the mailbox you are trying to reach is full, please try again later” and hangs up on you. By the way, their current phone number is 609-643-0090 x400 (the same as pressing 1 for customer service).
- The dotPhoto servers delete photo albums at random without warning. Yes, that is correct. Their system removes photo albums without warning. When you contact customer service about it. They claim that you either gave the password to someone and that person deleted the albums. Another excuse is that you uploaded corrupt photos and the system deleted them. Yeah right! Those albums have been there for years. Now all of a sudden they are all gone?
- Searching on line for reviews on dotPhoto and MyPhotoAlbum returned some very interesting results. Others have experienced the same thing. Even professional accounts had albums deleted without warning. Also many others had great experiences with dotPhoto up until 2008. Today, it appears that the policies of dotPhoto reflect those of MyPhotoAlbum (read: they suck).
- Contacting dotPhoto customer service is all via e-mail (support@dotphoto.com) and everything that comes back in replies are pretty much canned responses. Most of which is stating (in nicer terms) “hey idiot, it is user error”. The explanations ranged from me giving my password to someone and they deleted my albums, to me deleting all of my albums, to someone guessed my “easy” password (which happens to be 10 alpha-numeric with 2 punctuation symbols, oh sure that is “easy” to guess) and gained access to my account, to I uploaded corrupt images (yeah I must have time-machine and went back in time to upload them today, since those albums were years old). Eventually, like other web posts, dotPhoto customer service just stops responding without reason or reply.
- dotPhoto customer service claims that they reserve the right to delete anything inactive over 90 days without warning. To us, that is totally unacceptable because it is our digital content. At least give a warning and ask us to order a backup copy on DVD.
- Apparently, dotPhoto is an online photo service company that does not want to really provide customer service.
All in all, this is pretty much the last straw. I cannot work with a company that is this unreliable and does not care about their customer’s digital content, even if it was just for fun family photos. Especially not for any of my professional photography stuff. How can I have photo galleries online for clients to see, if the hosting company can randomly decide to remove them without notice? Heck, it is embarrassing to have family and friends goto a gallery link that was sent to them in e-mail resulting in a redirection to the dotPhoto home page.
NOTE: dotPhoto is no longer consistent in their prints between batches and prices are not the most competitive online photo printer around.
Thankfully, my professional photo galleries are hosted by SmugMug. Their support team is beyond fantastic. Too bad the labs they use (ez-prints and BayPhoto) is a little more pricey for my average family fun photos.
I now need to research which inexpensive photo printer will allow us to store our photos for reprints later … and not delete them. So, if you have a suggestion, please let me know.
dotphoto is suck…. I login to acccount today and found more than five albums disappear and I email their customer services support@dotphoto.com and they reply “Perhaps you have saved other albums on other servicews”…… this is ridiculous, I just want my photos BACK!!! How can they delete my photos without a warning!!!!
My Grandmother recently passed & our family was putting together a “collage” of family photos and I had the only recent photos of her healthy and happy @ a big Italian dinner. My computer had recently lost the hard-drive an I was not able to recover recent photos, but I thought “Thank goodness I have them backed up on DotPhoto”. Well DotPhoto just inactivated me three days prior with to my discovery. NO EMAIL WARNING, NOTHING….so customer service activated me for one day to upgrade my account & that day happen to be the day of the FUNERAL. What a slap in the face, not only did I not get the last photos of my Grandma but the only day they allowed me to upgrade to save my photos was the day of the funeral!!!!! Below is my correspondence.
Alrighty then, I STILL CANNOT SIGN IN TO MY DAMN ACCOUNT TO PURCHASE THE MEMBERSHIP!!!!!!!! What don’t you understand about that? I try to sign in & my account is inactive, if I try to purchase a membership, it says my ID already exist, I am trying frantically to sign up and save my pictures but DOTPHOTO SUPPORT IS NOT HELPING ME DO THAT!!!!!!
—–Original Message—–
From: “support@dotphoto.com” [support@dotphoto.com]
Date: 10/11/2009 09:11 PM
To: “grubeo@myway.com”
Subject: Re: Ticket #5521-10002736: Solution Suggested (You inactivated my account with no prior notice!!!!!!!)
A solution for your issue has been suggested by Jenn Link.
Solution:
Hello, I am sorry for your loss. This is not something that we are able to extend on an account by account basis. Once the account was re-activated it was only allowed for one additional day since over 30 days were already given.
Because we had an overwhelming surge of requests to restore inactive accounts, DotPhoto has extended the grace period. For a very short while, it will be possible to restore your account. This will end when our old server account is no longer available and this may happen very soon. Please take action immediately. Extensions are not possible.
PURCHASING A MEMBERSHIP IS THE ONLY WAY TO RESTORE AN INACTIVE ACCOUNT.
· Purchase a paid membership plan with a credit card – Login to your account – If you DO NOT purchase a membership, your account and ALL it’s contents WILL BE DELETED SOON. Once deleted it can not be recalled.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Jen L.
dotPhoto Support
Ticket Information:
Ticket #:5521-10002736
Date Created:10/9/2009 10:01 PM EDT
Summary:You inactivated my account with no prior notice!!!!!!!
Details:To whom this may concern,
Ticket #:5521-10002128
Apparently you did not even really read the email I sent you, because YOU ACTIVATED MY ACCOUNT FOR THE ONE DAY I WAS AT THE FUNERAL!!!!!!!!! Was I suppose to leave my grandmother funeral to appease some ONE DAY ONLY ACCESS to my account. This is completely unacceptable behavior. Since Dot-Photo is holding all of my photos hostage, I need access to my account to purchase my membership and access my pictures. Is there someone I can talk to beside a customer service rep, preferably management on this matter? Because the snide comment “of the three emails you sent me” rubs me the wrong way. It is 2009 & people use SPAM FILTERS that could account for the fact I never got “the Three Emails you sent me in September!!!!!” Are you really this pompous as a company?
Unbelievably appalled
Gregory A Rubeo
i’ve been using dotphoto for years! its been great. I even stopped using snapfish cuz i assumed dotphoto was better. Apparently i was wrong! they deactivated my account for no reason! they said my account has not been active for the past 90 days. thats complete BS! upload my photos on a monthly basis!! now everything is all gone! all my pictures for the past 7 years! i will never use dotphoto ever again.
Did anyone ever get their photo’s back?
I am ready to call consumer affairs, the better business bureau, my attorney & the media!
I don’t think dotPhoto can get anybody’s photos back. I think they are covering up a systems crash. Maybe that is why they moved to using Amazon S3 as the backhaul data store now. Most likely their own infrastructure sucks! Or they never used redundant storage of any kind.
I sure hope that is some class-action lawsuit against them for damages. For some people dotPhoto lost their treasured memories.
However, for myself, I believe in having my own backup copies of my images. At least stored in more than one place, where I can get to them. Not just with one company or on one hard drive.
I am beyond mad! I have 3 years worth of photos of my children uploaded and organized on dotphoto and I add photos monthly if not biweekly to the site. I logged on one day and it was telling me that my account was inactive. After finally getting through to a person on the phone they had the audacity to tell me that they were bought out and that they had sent me emails warning me that my pictures would be deleted -total and complete bs! I NEVER received any emails. I was practically crying on the phone and the nasty abnoxious woman wouldn’t even say she was sorry….she basically hung up the phone on me and told me too bad….I am disgusted and frustrated and can’t imagine how this is legal. I am curious to know if you all complained to the better business bureau or know of any class action lawsuits?????
Shoshanah
um… i think its written in their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. We just never bother reading those stuff when we sign up.
@ruby, it was not in their ORIGINAL Terms Of Service, when they first started business. It is the most recent TOS that says they can delete images. Their original TOS said “unlimited storage” and never required anyone to buy a subscription to anything. Many of the complaints are from their older customers whom had their accounts wiped without warning.
DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY.
I have been a customer of this company since day 1 !!!!
last few months i was away..only to come back and see DOT PHOTO had deleted all my 15 albums..no warning, no calls, no letters.. no NOTHING…
BEAWARE…
DO NOT POST YOUR PICTURES WITH THIS COMPANY, You ‘ll be sorry..
I found this blog after Googling the phrase ‘dotphoto spam’, the reason for which will become clear.
First let me say how much I sympathise with those who’ve lost stored photos. My own issue with DotPhoto isn’t nearly as bad, but the timing of the merger mentioned in the second paragraph seems significant.
As a matter of routine, whenever I deal with a new individual or company, I use a new e-mail address unique to that entity. That way, if they engage in aggressive marketing and won’t remove me from the mailing list, or if the address is compromised and I start to get spam, I (a) have a good idea where it’s come from and (b) can filter it out.
I was a DotPhoto customer on just one occasion back in 2002. I never stored any of my photos on their system but I did buy a couple of prints of someone else’s work, for which DotPhoto required an e-mail address. I used a unique address, completed the transaction, and thought nothing more of it.
Then a little less than two years ago I started to get spam to that address. Not photo-related commercial spam from possible partner companies but full-on, enhance-your-dangly-bits type spam that left nothing to the imagination and had nothing to do with DotPhoto.
Because I’d had no correpondence with DotPhoto since 2002 I thought it very unlikely that my address had been compromised in transit, otherwise I’d have been getting junk mail since day one. The situation felt more like my e-mail address had been accidentally revealed or deliberately sold and had found its way onto a spammer’s list. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was why it would suddenly begin after six+ years. Nothing suggested that DotPhoto’s systems had been compromised in any way. And e-mail to their support people went unanswered.
But I now realise that the MyPhotoAlbum/DotPhoto merger mentioned above coincides very nicely with the time I started to get this spam (the acquisition took place in February 2009 according to records). I still can’t be certain whether it was accidental or deliberate but it does seem as though my address was compromised at some point at or around this time.
Coincidence? I’m not a great believer in it. I would certainly be interested to know if any other customers used unique addresses for DotPhoto, and if those addresses started to attract spam around the beginning of 2009. While I’d like to believe this was accidental, if not then it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a struggling company had sold a customer database to make a fast buck.
I totally can relate. I too create special e-mail addresses for each company that I deal with. If they sell my e-mail address, I know who to go after.
Several years ago, a children’s company (The First Years) sold our e-mail address to several porn websites which started spamming us. Can you believe that? They are a company catering to children for heaven sake! Long story short, I contacted their IT department and their VP of Information Technology said “sorry we cannot control e-mail addresses that ‘you’ use” despite the fact that that e-mail address was only used with The First Years website. So I contacted their Public Relations department and went up the corporate ladder from there. In the end, we got a letter from the president of the company apologizing for the security compromise and stated that the VP of Information Technology is no longer with the company. Guess somebody in their IT department wanted to make a quick buck and sell off their database of e-mail addresses.
We too have been seeing spam sent to our unique address which was only used at dotPhoto. Looks like someone (probably a very unhappy employee) at dotPhoto (guess prior to the merger) stole a copy of the e-mail database and has sold it off as well. I highly doubt their system was compromised just to steal e-mail addresses. They would steal the credit card numbers that were stored there instead; highly more profitable on the black market (I heard you get like $60-$250 per valid credit card number, compared to the $1-$5 per valid e-mail address).
Keep on using those ‘unique’ e-mail addresses, it makes it easier to keep track of who is selling your e-mail address. I promise you, my blog won’t sell your address!
Did anyone ever have any luck getting back their photos????