📸 Fototime down FOREVER! Not coming back on line, ever! see pg 12

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If there was a PayPal option to pay and if it's within the dispute window that could help reaching out. Most PP vendors frown when being contacted that way and tend to respond quickly.




Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Dallas, Texas, FotoTime, is a digital photography solutions provider specializing in software that enables consumers to manage the entire lifecycle of their digital photos and video. ... The company is privately held.

FotoTime Background Information
Background
One of the most popular and exciting consumer technology products on the market today is the digital camera. The replacement of film technology with digital photos presents consumers with many challenges, not the least of which is how to organize, share and print their digital photos. When the founders of FotoTime purchased their first digital cameras, they soon realized that once digital pictures were downloaded from their digital cameras, there were no integrated tools that met their organizing, sharing and printing needs.

What are FotoTime's Products?
FotoTime provides a suite of digital photography solutions designed from the ground up to be completely integrated and is the only product suite from a single company designed to handle the entire lifecyle of a digital photo.

FotoTime's FotoAlbum Pro image managment software serves as the digital "shoe box" for user's photo and video collection. Photos and videos can be organized into albums and sub albums with the capability of adding metadata such as captions, keywords (tags), dates and ratings. Using FotoAlbum Pro's one-click FotoSync process, photos and metadata can be transferred to a user's FotoShare web account for friends and family to view. With advanced features such as exif/iptc importing and exporting, batch editing, and more, FotoAlbum Pro is the perfect tool for beginners to professional photographers.

FotoTime's web based photo sharing service, FotoShare, makes it easy to share photos and videos with friends and family, and also use photos in forums, blogs, and eBay auctions. Users can upload pictures and videos directly to their FotoShare account and organize them into albums. FotoShare's invitation system allows users to e-mail guests links to view their photos and includes security to control exactly what albums and photos the guests will see. FotoShare also includes some of the newest web 2.0 features including tag searchable user contributed content, a powerful ajax user interface, and rss feeds for users albums.

FotoStudio is a service for amateur and professional digital photographers to easily and cost effectively setup an online storefront to sell prints and gifts showcasing their photos. With the new service, photographers upload photos to their FotoStudio ‘store’ and set prices for the print and gift items for each event. Users can personalize their account by changing fonts, colors and even adding their own logos. FotoStudio includes marketing tools to e-mail the participants at each event and provides watermarking of photos for increased security. As customers make purchases, FotoStudio tracks the profits for each sale. Payments are made automatically each month by electronic funds transfer, check or PayPal.

The FotoTime Store enables consumers to purchase high quality prints or custom gifts. The FotoTime store offers prints ranging from wallet size to poster size 30x40 prints in either glossy or matte finished. In addition, users can create custom photo gifts using their photos, such as mugs and t-shirts, and can even select from items not offered at other retailers such as photo playing cards, photo calendars and photo sports balls. The FotoTime store is integrated into all of FotoTime's products allowing customers to place orders from their desktop using FotoAlbum, or while online using FotoShare or FotoStudio.

Who uses FotoTime's Products?
FotoTime's solutions are targeted for the beginning, amateur and professional photographer. As more people switch from film to digital, they are looking for workflows to replicate how they worked with film. FotoTime's integrated product line was designed from the ground up with an entire workflow solution in mind that includes capturing, correcting/editing, managing/storing and sharing photos.

FotoTime provides all the tools that users of digital photography need in a single integrated package. In creating powerful tools with similar desktop and web user interfaces, FotoTime provides the most integrated and easy to learn solution for managing pictures on a user's desktop and the internet. Using FotoTime's exclusive FotoSync technology, it is also possible to quickly transfer images between the desktop, handheld devices, and the internet with a click of the mouse.

What is the FotoTime business model?
FotoTime delivers its offerings to customers in more than 80 countries through an Internet distribution.

FotoAlbum Pro is sold through our online store and is delivered electronically through an activation key. FotoAlbum Pro's vast feature set and its $49.99 retail price makes it very competitive to other companies products.

FotoTime's online photo sharing service, FotoShare, is offered with two different membership options. Users can sign up for a free FotoShare account which is ad supported with banner ads that show when guests view their photos and videos. Users can also purchase a $23.99 annual subscription, which not only includes ad-free online photo and video sharing, but also an abundance of online storage and an enhanced feature set.

The FotoStudio service costs $47.98 a year, and allows amateur and professional event photographers to easily setup an online store to sell prints and gifts of their photos for profit. Unlike FotoShare, there is not a free ad sponsored version of FotoStudio.

The FotoTime store allows guests to easily purchase prints and gifts created from their photos. FotoTime offers a wide variety of print and gift items, with prices starting at 10 cents for either glossy or matte 4x6 prints.

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I posted a query on their Facebook page and it was deleted in an hour. Jeff and Karl (the owners?) are watching, yet not responding.

So very inappropriate. All of us longtime supporters.

I am remiss only because of 20 years worth of posts (elsewhere) with visuals for reference are now rendered irrelevant and useless.. There is no way I could replace and find all of them.

A year ago I asked them if they were in this for the long run. "Yes." they said. I reupped with assurance.
 
If they had good intentions they could simply update the FB page and send out a bulk email alert to all the customers. In this day and age no reason to be left in the lurch. Some things are more important like life and death, but you own a business the basic communication needs should be addressed to calm the waters.
 
I posted a query on their Facebook page and it was deleted in an hour. Jeff and Karl (the owners?) are watching, yet not responding.

So very inappropriate. All of us longtime supporters.

I am remiss only because of 20 years worth of posts (elsewhere) with visuals for reference are now rendered irrelevant and useless.. There is no way I could replace and find all of them.

A year ago I asked them if they were in this for the long run. "Yes." they said. I reupped with assurance.
rat bastards
 
My only hope is they are in it for the money. They know they have us trapped in a bad place. I had this happen once before with a photo sharing service. Same MO, one day the site was gone. Eventually they came out and said if you sent an international money order to an address overseas, Netherlands I think, they would make a disc of your photos. I gave it no hope and considered it money gone when I sent it. About 2 months later I received a disc of my pictures. (You would think after that I would have learned to back up my photos, but I did not :( ). I am hoping something like that will happen with administrators at fototime.
 
Hi Everybody,

I was referred to this site by a poster on Fototime's Facebook page. Several Fototime users landed there in search of an answer. I posted there as "Elaine-iaK Chocolat" and I will repeat the information I posted there.

This is the information I found in a Google search of the company;

Fototime was registered under:
Andrew Pitts
6711 Atlanta Dr.
Colleyville, TX 76034

Fototime's President:
Karl Swierenga
12660 Hillcrest Rd #4201
Dallas, TX 76230
Karl also owns KPS Solutions and Equitystat Solutions (I researched both companies and left messages wherever possible.)
A number I found for Karl is (214) 923-2806. I left a phone message; no response. I also located his personal FB page; no luck there.

Fototime's V.P.:
Jeff Kelling
3803 Cibola Trail
Carrollton, TX 75007

My frustration with Fototime going out of business (which I have assumed they have) is that I had built photo albums with detailed descriptions of my travels before blogs came along. I have hard copy backups of the photos as well as backing up my computer to Carbonite; however, I really enjoyed going back to Fototime to look through my albums and seeing the photo descriptions. I have done a ton of traveling, so friends and fellow travel club members would refer to my site as well.

I also have a line of photo cards, so I used Fototime for customers to see my cards and e-mail me with orders. (I was at ExquisiteCards.Fototime.com)

In addition to my site, I set up one for my husband's business. Now it looks like we both have to toss our business cards in the recycle bin and start over.

FRUSTRATING!

Even if we are able to get backups of our photos from Fototime, will it ever be possible to get backups with the descriptions we posted???
 
Thanks for the information. It's a shame to see all of that work go down the drain if the site never comes back up. Even with backups it will take time to rebuild things that once were and some can be hard to replicate. Good luck.

 
Photos on fototime from FotoAlbum are posted in a SQLite format (.sq3 files). This database contains the comments you added to your posts amongst a lot of other info. Now to work out how to extract these when posting the photos to an alternative site.... When it is confirmed that fototime is really dead (as expected), I will see what I can do.
 
SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine that requires no configuration and reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with tables, indexes, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file. The engine, and thus the file format, support a full-featured SQL implementation.
Aug 21, 2020

 
I posted a query on their Facebook page and it was deleted in an hour. Jeff and Karl (the owners?) are watching, yet not responding.

So very inappropriate. All of us longtime supporters.

I am remiss only because of 20 years worth of posts (elsewhere) with visuals for reference are now rendered irrelevant and useless.. There is no way I could replace and find all of them.

A year ago I asked them if they were in this for the long run. "Yes." they said. I reupped with assurance.
Your query is probably the one I saw briefly, and then POOF! It disappeared, as did my post. Karl Swierenga is President of the company, so he is probably the owner. Jeff Kelling is the V.P.

I am convinced they have gone under, because KPS Solutions, another company Karl owns has a website that has gone dead as well.
 
Yeah Fototime appears down for the count. I have all my photos on my HDD but used FT to upload to forums. I had just renewed in early March @ $23.95 but MC accepted my dispute no questions, and I got a refund. I think they probably wrote it off rather than try to get it from the vendor. Too bad we lost this service.
 
I wonder if it is covid related

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Gary look how many new members have chimed in with your thread

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Gary look how many new members have chimed in with your thread

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Helluva way to do it, but we did get some new blood on the forum. Be nice if they stick around and have some fun with the rest of us.
 
One reason why there have been newbies is the lack of transparency with this company. Doing a search on the web and very little comes back. I had this discussion a few years ago when PB pulled a BS stunt. A handful of members signed up including TT (Bill) RIP. I've always had mixed feelings about them. The lack of transparency when doing a search and the old FB page that never has updates for outages or other ways of communication. That isn't good for potential customers looking for a new hosting site.
 
Do you think they will eventually offer a disc of members photos to purchase? Seems like a win win for them. I guess they have everyones email or address to contact.
 
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