Digital Railroad - 24 Hours, and Counting to Shutdown
The front page of DRR says:
When you visit the Digital Railroad website, this is the message you get:
MEMBER ANNOUNCEMENTS
Digital Railroad Suspending Operations – Added Oct. 28, 2008
To our valued Members:
We're sorry to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.
On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to suspend all operations.
Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.
Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years.
All questions pertaining to claims should be addressed to:
Digital Railroad, Inc.
c/o Diablo Management Group
1452 N. Vasco Road, #301
Livermore, CA 94551
Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you've got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.
29 comments:
A classy way to shut down...
Classy my a$$ (I have a feeling the comment was sarcastic). Classy would allow the members who have several thousand images time to migrate to new systems more than 24 hours...
Even then, with the load the system will be under when syndicating tens of thousands of images, it will take a very long time.
I know they've always said not to use DRR as a the only place to store images, but this really isn'
t fair to members who use the system and make a living from it..
As a long-time Photoshelter user, all of my images are safely located there, so luckily I do not need to transfer my files....
Should I just delete all my files at DRR? Is there any concern abut leaving them on some server somewhere? What are you doing John?
Cheers, Josh
Did anyone get a confirmation message that they stop charging your credit cards?
I have just subscribed...
It's officially gone.
http://www.digitalrailroad.net/
Not even 24 hours ... I just tried to transfer my images to Photoshelter and it wouldn't work ... when I clicked refresh I got this &%$#!!!
"October 28, 2008
To our valued Members and Partners:
We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.
On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to close all operations.
Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.
Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years.
All questions pertaining to claims should be addressed to:
Digital Railroad, Inc
c/o Diablo Management Group
1452 N. Vasco Road, #301
Livermore, CA 94551"
My stuff is backed up ... I would never trust any "corporation" with my original files. I have a feeling though there are going to be a lot of pissed off photographers. It's typical of how business is done these days and I'm sure that the company was set up so there's no recourse for us photographers. Luckily ... I changed my billing to monthly last week so I only was charged $50 ... I'll be calling my credit card company not to see if I can have those charges denied.
E-mail announcing the shutdown went out about 30 minutes ago. DRR.net is not accessible, but I was able to log into my personal DRR site and pull much needed sales info that I need to follow up with them about. I'm not happy they billed me for the year 30 days before the shut down. Bitter is an understatement.
My stuff is backed up also, but I am trying to transfer it to Photoshelter directly from DRR. No luck yet. You would think DRR would leave things up long enough for photographers to get their images off the server. DRR also has payments to me pending. Any ideas if we might get lucky enough to actually get paid. I understand companies not being able to make it in this economy, but to basically do business as usual (I got a Research Network image request email today) and then send out an email saying "Sorry, we're closing now." sort of sucks.
I never made a lot of money with DRR, and it really didn't cost me that much cash, but knowing I wasted all that time uploading and keywording, and now having to do it all over with Photoshelter depresses me. I need a good searchable offsite internet based archive, but I'm beginning to wonder if the stock business will ever be worth the time and effort it seems to take for the very little revenues it produces. I do not want to even think about screwing with Getty or Corbis or the like.
I guess I will have to continue to survive on assignments, at least until that goes away.
Yeah, What Jim Goldstein said. My annual renewal fees are fresh out of my pocketbook by six weeks. At least I can say that DRR sales are paying for my next solution, ironically possibly Photoshelter. I'll miss Marketplace most of all. But the short story is this had great potential, and to have fallen so short, is a disgrace.
Now I need to figure out how to handle the unpaid pending licenses.
woof.
...and people were complaining about the way Photoshelter handled the PSC shutdown. Photoshelter sent out an email to _everyone_ annoucing the PSC shutdown over a month in advance.
Way to screw over your paying customers, DRR. They could at least have given more than 24h notice before the axe fell...
I hate to sound so negative all the time but every where you turn photographers are getting the short end of the stick...again.
Photoshelter is the only place that I know of where the photographer is #1 in the food chain.
I'll be glad when they run Getty out of business so that finally respect, pricing integrity and professionalism returns to the marketplace.
If only the photographers who work at Getty would just say no. Imagine that. An industry correcting itself through good business practices.
Hanging on for the sake of hanging on only leads to more hanging on imho.
Unfortunately, it won't get fixed until we ALL get it.
I'm sorry to hear the DRR shooters are getting the short end today.
Just because they are out of business as DRR, that doesn't mean they erased the image files from the servers. The storage boxes (now owned by Diablo, I guess) should still have everything on them - You and all other customers should contact diablo to determine how they plan to distribute the image files.
> You and all other customers should contact diablo to determine how they plan to distribute the image files.
ha. good luck with that. :(
Ken Murray said:
"Photoshelter is the only place that I know of where the photographer is #1 in the food chain."
Where were you when they shut down their Collection after less than 12 months of operation, wasting their contributors millions of man-hours of effort in aggregate?
The whole PSC thing was so ill-conceived, it makes the DRR marketplace look like absolute brilliance.
I'm curious to know what the cash position and cash flow of PhotoShelter is. How much money do they have left? And whats their burn rate? Do they have any plausible plan to obtain profitability? Because after the failure of DRR they can pretty much forget about raising any more cash - ever. Moving images from one to the other might just delay the inevitable.
No finger-pointing, just dismay.
As a former Railroader (released on 10/15), I am truly shocked and disappointed at the way this has played out in the last 13 days. I cannot fathom why a more reasonably-timed runway wasn't constructed to allow all our friends and members to safely navigate to other solutions.
I truly believed better of us as I worked tirelessly for the past two plus years to level the playing field for our members. Perhaps I drank the Kool-Aid too eagerly.
I wish I could apologize personally to each and every one of you I worked with, and I wish you a safe and successful transition to a more stable and prosperous outlet for your amazing work.
Fabian -- one of the reasons I'm such a fan of PhotoShelter's business acumen is that they've stated the Personal Archive is turning a profit and has zero debt.
Well, looks like we may not be able to transfer images from DRR to Photoshelter. I set up everything per PS's directions and all my images are queued up over at DRR but transfer is "pending". This has been going on for 5 hours. Seems like everything at DRR is "pending" (see my comment on payments). Unfortunately, I keyworded through DRR so all that work will be lost.
Dan,
Sorry to hear about the loss of your keywords. It sounds like too many people are going through the same because they did their keywording in the web interface instead of by putting the keywords into the IPTC metadata of the image using a program like Adobe Bridge or PhotoMechanic. I keep my keywords in the metadata as much as possible, and as a result it's easy for me to switch agencies or upload a test submission to a new site. Since I'll often devote a substantial amount of time to keywording and captioning a particular image, I'm always very glad to have my keywords backed up with my images.
Fabian Gonzales Said:
"Where were you when they shut down their Collection after less than 12 months of operation, wasting their contributors millions of man-hours of effort in aggregate?
Hi Fabian:
I'm sure the aggregate man hours were substantial. The aggregate of any venture involving thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of images would be.
I disagree that the venture was ill conceived. I think the main problem with that market is that too many photographers are willing to give their images away for free or for a pittance or even just for minor/miniscule recognition.
I had a photomom call me because she didn't know how to resize an image she had on a public site that a book publisher wanted to use for a photography book.
She didn't have the original file anywhere she could find it and wanted me to pull it off the internet and resize it to send to the publisher.
I asked her if she had finished negotiating the price with them and she said she didn't want anything she just wanted to be published. Her demeanor in this conversation was sheer desperation to get her image in that book.
I think of those situations as that piece of crap editor couldn't come up with any money to give this poor lady. No, he had some poor overly enthusiastic fish on his hook and he was going to suck it in and spit it out.
If DRR was absolute brilliance...
Fabian Gonzales said:
I'm curious to know what the cash position and cash flow of PhotoShelter is. How much money do they have left? And whats their burn rate? Do they have any plausible plan to obtain profitability? Because after the failure of DRR they can pretty much forget about raising any more cash - ever. Moving images from one to the other might just delay the inevitable."
With all do respect Fabian, the folks at Photoshelter are the most intellegent, hardworking, committed and respected people in the industry today and if you don't think this company is going anywhere than just sit back watch them work.
I don't know any of these folks personally but I spent 4 years on wall street in my younger days and know the value of hard work/sound business values. You'll do well to hitch your cart to this horse my friend.
There are very few companies who will respect you Fabian and your work. Photoshelter is one of them.
Everyone makes mistakes in life but you have to work hard all the way through.
You also have to position yourself so the vultures can't strip you clean.
Educate your fellow photographers on the value of their work and once we all stop giving away images, we benefit.
I hope this doesn't offend you or anyone else.
2 years ago, I chose DRR to work. That time they had a big problem and our archives were out of service for some days. I decided to join DRR because of the way how they managed this problem.
Now I am disappointed with this quick way to shut down. 24 ours is impossible to syndicate ours archives!!
And I don't know if they will pay ours Marketplace sales!
Good lucky for all.
Marcos Issa/Argosfoto - Brazil
What if Jill Greenberg had all her files on DRR and did not receive the notice of DRR shutting down. :-)
Ha Ha.
Seriously, what happens to the files of people who were traveling or out of contact?
Update on my DRR debacle. As of this morning, part of my image "files" have transfered. I say files, because although something is in my archive at Photoshelter, I don't know what, because they are all listed as "image not available". And I say part, because there were all kinds of errors listed on the DRR syndication page. Guess I'm going to have to start over and reload from my backup copies. What a clusterf**k!
What about erasing all the files before they close the connection. I'm hesistating. I really wonder what diabolo (!) will do with the hard drives ....
Someone could help ?
Hey, Grover chiming in here. I am one of the founders of PhotoShelter, and thought I would lend my perspective on a few things that have appeared in these comments.
The PhotoShelter Collection (PSC) was closed down after only 1 year of operation, and that is unfortunate for everyone involved.
Fabian's comment: "The whole PSC thing was so ill-conceived, it makes the DRR marketplace look like absolute brilliance."
I really don't think you know what you are talking about in this case. The concept was actually working, and was going according to plan.
We raised $4 million is a series A round and were planning to raise more with a series B at the end of '08. Well, the economy changed and funds that were earmarked for startups like ours were suddenly unavailable.
So we did what we thought was the most responsible thing -- protect the Personal Archive by eliminating the burn rate that the PSC put on the company.
We took a lot of grief over this decision, but knew that the most important thing was to keep the company alive, and 35,000 archives online.
The forecast for the economy is downright scary. The smartest thing any company can do right now is to cut the burn rate to zero, and concentrate of fortifying the portions of your company that are making money.
This is exactly what we did.
Now is not the time to re-invent the wheel. It is a time to survive what's coming.
Don't know if anyone noticed but most of the agencies that used Digital Railroad still have their archives online so someone is still working at DRR!!
Looks like its just the photographers that got the bum deal.
Eric, Ken, Grover:
I'm happy to hear PhotoShelter is profitable. I would expect nothing less, but it's good to know nonetheless. It lends a lot of confidence to PhotoShelter in these trying times, and I wish them the best of luck.
I still maintain that PSC was an ill-conceived idea, and have commented on that previously on this forum and elsewhere.
And while Grover's explanation for the shutdown makes more sense, I do note that it differs significantly from the accounts given by Allen at the time of shutdown.
the American Photo magazine blog has Evan Nisselson's account of the DRR closure, and his explanation for why contributors had so little notice:
http://tinyurl.com/5ukq75
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