Saturday, March 18, 2017

Civic Center Photo Apocalypse

The photos from the last ten years at Civic Center are now broken links. This isn't the first time I have been burned by a tech company offering small amounts of free photo storage in exchange for buzz and usage. When I started publishing this site, I used a Mac.com account and paid something like a $100 annual fee. Then the creeps at Apple decided they were no longer going to support Mac.com, and five years' worth of photo links vanished overnight. Then I migrated everything to Dropbox, using their "Public" option. A couple of months ago, there was an email from Dropbox announcing they were no longer supporting their "Public" folder starting March 15th. I blame it all on Condoleeza Rice who is on their Board of Directors. In any case, I will be very slowly relinking photos in old posts to a new Google Photo Album account, but it will be a long, slow process. If there is a particular photo you would desperately like to see or use, email me at fototales2001@yahoo.com, and I will see what can be done.

13 comments:

Donald Kinney said...

Total bummer.

Civic Center said...

Yeah, total bummer, but a good reminder to live in the present. I considered shutting down the blog like many of my other self-publishing compatriots because it's so much work, but I realized it was still bringing me and my readers pleasure and useful information. It's okay.

mw said...

Brutal. Love your blog, I'd hate to see you shut it down, but I understand the feeling after a setback like this.

Ive posted most of my blog pics over the years directly into Blogger, where (since the acquision) they got swept into Picassa, and (presumably) now into Google Photo. I don't really know where they go, but so far so good.

I do worry about Google Blogger in general though. They've lost so much ground, both technically and in popularity, to Wordpress I'm concerned Google might throw in the towel like they have with other platforms. Google sure has not put a lot of effort into Blogger in recent years. I've got an awful lot of time and effort tied up in Blogger.

Rachel said...

Oh no! Awful news.
I do love reading your blog, you have a lovely way with words, photos or no photos.
Be kind to yourself!

Civic Center said...

Ah, thanks Michael and Rachel. It's yet another reminder that tech platforms are as evanescent as 0's and 1's floating in the cloud.

Patrick J. Vaz said...

Really sorry to hear this. Your blog has been a great record of Bay Area life in our times.

Christine Okon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Christine Okon said...

Painful. So sorry. I lost a decade of photos I had on Webshots before they went under, taking the content with them. Gone! Gone! I still am grieving after many years.

Nancy Ewart said...

Sorry to read about how much you have lost - it's a double shame because your blog is an irreplacable record of the Bay Area and with a unique POV. I don't save anything on the web, probably a paranoid reaction to my job at UCSF where supervisors looked for things that employees had posted, with a desire to cause shame and harm. Plus, I am no where near the photographer you are. But I do save what little I save - to CD's and an external hard drive, while realizing that they are as transitory as anything else in this life.

chris enquist said...

terrible news. i read your blog every day. I hope this doesn't mean the end of it.

Civic Center said...

Dear Chris: No, I'm still enjoying being informative and opinionated in public, so the blog will continue. This medium was sort of made for me, and I love not having anyone tell me what to write or what to show. That's why I put my email address out there. If you want a picture, email me.

Hattie said...

I keep all my photos on Big Bertha, my desk computer, + flash drive+ external hard drive.
I don't trust Apple. I have lost half the music I downloaded and have never been able to retrieve it. Grrr!
I love blogging and will continue to blog as long as I can still lift my hands to the keyboard. Your blog is one of my faves.

janinsanfran said...

A nightmare. Some of the early bits of my blog have lost their photos (Flickr ...) I think. A year or so ago Google let me download my entire Blogger blog and I did, with the consequence that I have a lot of duplicates on a hard drive. Now I've forgotten how to do that again ...