Fotopedia is shutting down

[arb99]

Never heard of it before, but its homepage - http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/magazine has lots of great pics.

And http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/stories/CxVE4flM6pA is pretty good

[jonnym1ller]

This is really sad news to hear, especially after having put 6+ years into building the photo-encyclopedia and community of storytellers. But there are still other great storytelling platforms out there to give a home for Fotopedia's orphaned stories! Exposure.so focuses on photo narratives Cowbird.com is a great place for personal stories (and is funded by their community), Storehouse is good for visual storytelling on the iPad, and also the visual storytelling platform Maptia (full disclosure I'm a co-founder) at http://maptia.com – our team is already working hard to get a special import feature ready for Fotopedia storytellers – please email us at [email protected] if you're interested in joining our community and would like to use our import feature to preserve your stories!

[bitJericho]

Can you please provide this data to Archive.org or work with them to save this data?

[toomuchtodo]

Already talking to Jason/ArchiveTeam about it.

[dublinben]

The photos all appear to be Copyright, All Rights Reserved by the original photographers. It's up to them to find another place to publish their photos.

[niutech]

Or just upload them all to Flickr/Google+ Photos for free.

[PaulHoule]

These guys saw my site

http://ookaboo.com/

years ago and tried to hire me but I was too hung up in a dead end job and my general confusion at the time. It's funny to me know that after this time I have the stronger hand!

I probably lose $300 a month running Ookaboo right now, and I can afford that, but my site could use some sprucing up and more photos.

Write me or call me at [phone] if you want to see this happen.

[sixQuarks]

why does it cost you so much to run this site?

[tony_landis]

Does anyone have the owner's contact? If so please put me in touch at tonylandis-at-gmail, I am interested in purchasing.

[sp332]

Wow - only 10 days notice!

[poopsintub]

Better than nothing? I hate to say it, but I feel like I could slap an ad on their website/photo stories as-is, and make a decent amount of money. Not to mention, their apps. are free. I'm not sure if that would outweigh the server costs for hosting high-quality images though.

[opendais]

That is probably a cut off of some kind. [e.g. Not enough $$ to pay for their servers]

[hyperliner]

What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

[anon1385]

>What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

Get bought by Google, Facebook or Yahoo.

[chanon]

It looks like they had/have an free iPhone App. Did they even try putting ads in it?

No ads or subscription options on the site either.

[dewey]

Never heard of it before, I do like the map feature which is showing you pictures close to your location. [0] How were they going to monetize it? I can't find any information on the site but I think exposure.co's [1] pricing is pretty good. It's pretty much the same business (I don't know about Fotopedia's story editor but the one exposure is using is amazing) and they are charging for it.

[0] http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/map

[1] https://exposure.co/

[tommyd]

Really sad to hear about this - I love their iOS Apps, "Wild Friends" and "National Parks" in particular - beautiful photographs and I love the story telling aspect and frequent updates. I'll have to have a good look through them again before they stop functioning. Hopefully the content can be archived somehow - ideally in a way the app can access, although that's probably impossible without their help.

[superasn]

Those pics are beautiful and very hi-resolution. They do have a story to tell.

SmugMug may not be directly related but they make a fortune by giving sellers the options to sell live prints of their pics, paid galleries, etc. Also AdSense on free accounts cannot hurt either. I'm sure there must be a dozen different ways like this to monetize the site (unless of course the site costs a million dollar per month to run)

[jpn]

Hi everyone!

We wrote up a little comparison of all the Fotopedia alternatives.

You can check it out here:

https://bonjourn.al/blog/17-fotopedia-alternatives-a-short-l...

[reinier_s4g]

As many here never heard of it before but it looks like an awesome service and looks like they have an active community, wondering what went wrong? anybody? and again what was their monetization approach? We can all learn from that.

[ulfw]

Real pity. I loved the beautiful photography the app provided. It made me want to travel more. Maybe they should have work with the travel industry to make bookings available. Oh well.

[pan69]

Would National Geographic not be interested in purchasing this and keep it alive? It would be a shame to see it disappear.

[chrischen]

Have they tried selling prints? We also provide a photo to painting API that can be monetization for photo apps like this.

[zkar]

Their domain name would itself be worth quite some amount.