Gone

We think it is safe to assume that Fotopic has gone the way of the dodo. We've no idea of the actual reasoning for the website's withdrawal or the likely long-term effect this will have on transport hobbyists, but in both cases this heralds bad news.

Fotopic was one of the first photo-sharing websites we came across and m'colleague quickly set up an account of his own to showcase the hotch potch of transport photos he'd taken. I even uploaded a number from mine, to albums where this would add a greater depth of the subject matter.

However, since the autumn of 2009, we've had nothing more to do with Fotopic, ever since they dishonestly retained £20 of our money. As blog readers of that time may remember, we renewed our subscription though to the premium below that which we ultimately needed. The Fotopic website said that a further upgrade would be possible and the difference in annual fee would be refunded.

This we did and both amounts were taken but no refund was ever received. Religiously, until the end of the year, we emailed their customer services department, quoting our reference in the subject bar - as they requested we do for all communication - but nothing. I even wrote to the registered address of their parent company, Snappy Designs Limited. Still no reply or even an acknowledgement of our communications.

Clearly, this is not a responsible or encouraging manner for any company to operate in. The frequent periods the website was down also made it very unreliable even for the casual web surfer. Meanwhile all around them, new, more reliable photo hosting sites were becoming more and more popular - we have a flikr account though there's nothing of note on there as yet.

When m'colleague and I stop and think of the number of hours we spent cataloguing and uploading photos to Fotopic before adding captions, it really is depressing. And our collection was minuscule to some of the others out there.

The only consolation for us is that we'd not just renewed our Premium £45 subscription for another year! We're not betting men, but would strongly suspect that anyone who has will have to sing for a refund!