Source: https://www.xpressreg.net/register/phot109/hallonly/promostart.asp

NOTE: I am not affiliated in any way with this Expo. I am just planning to attend it.
 

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.
 

This photo received an honorable mention at the photo competition held on April 1, 2009 by Gateway Photographers of Staten Island.