I’m a bit overdue in my review of Digital Railroad and PhotoShelter… so overdue in fact my review will cover how each of these services died rather than what they offered photographers.
Both PhotoShelter Collection and Digital Railroad aimed at bucking the trends of the traditional photo stock market giving more to photographers on each sale. Unfortunately for both of these companies they were not positioned to weather a fast declining economy and shrinking credit market.
Photoshelter Collection
In the case of the PhotoShelter Collection near the 1 year mark of the service most members were surprised to learn that PhotoShelter would be abandoning Collection. As to the reasons why it was later clarified in the comments of John Harrington’s post Digital Railroad – 24 Hours, and Counting to Shutdown by PhotoShelter’s Grover Sanschagrin:
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.
The closure of PhotoShelter Collection left a bad taste in a lot of photographers mouths as a lot of effort was put in to the submission and keywording of photographs. Several photographers I know went so far as to drop what they were doing focus on this and/or hire temps to help with the submission/keywording process. A lot of effort and in some cases money that was felt to be wasted. As frustrated as photographers have been about the closure of PS Collection it was wound down in an orderly fashion.
Digital Railroad
Digital Railroad on the other hand went down in a blaze of glory so quickly that it has caught many photographers and boutique stock agencies using their services by surprise. In fact the process has been nothing short of chaotic. Many boutique stock agencies are soon to be offline with no online presence, many photographers are scrambling to get their work off DRR & online elsewhere (including PhotoShelter Archive), photographers are scrambling to collect payment on outstanding sales through DRR, and in some cases fighting to get back recent renewals for the DRR service.
On October 15th an email was sent out to Digital Railroad subscribers that informed members of a staff cut and a pursuit of additional funding. John Harrington’s Photo Business Forum was on top of the announcement with detailed background explaining the dire situation “Digital Railroad likely being Liquidated“. I caught this while in Switzerland and knew bad news was on the horizon. Unfortunately for me I was traveling light with out a laptop. I just went with the flow and by the time I returned on the 28th it was announced that Digital Railroad has shutdown. Mind you not that it was shutting down… it had shut down. At this point members were scrambling to get contact information, image license details and images removed from their service. The massive influx of activity brougth DRR to its knees and image transfers have been spotty at best making retrieval of an absolute mess. Initial word was that DRR would be closing its doors permanently to everyone with in 24 hours. Today word comes that the service will shut down in entirety by the end of October 31st “PhotoShelter say DRR Site Shuts Down Tomorrow”
What’s It All Mean?
The closure of PhotoShelter Collection and the implosion of Digital Railroad is proof that times are only going to get more difficult for photographers. Clearly as aggrevating as it turned out to be the closure of PhotoShelter Collection was orderly and with purpose even if not fully obvious to those taking part. The manner in which Digital Railroad has shut down on the other hand has pissed off thousands of photographers and left them temporarily vulnerable as they attempt to do business this fall and winter. In addition photographers who actually were conducting business successfully at DRR are now going to have to burn time writing Diablo Management Group (the agency liquidating the company) and fight for payment on licensed work. As solid as PhotoShelter Archive is with 35,000 archives photographers should closely examine if they’re putting all their eggs in one basket by employing one service with out a backup. The implosion of Digital Railroad should be a wake up call to photographers whether they were members of DRR or not. How sound is your online business strategy and what is your backup in the event of a catastrophic service failure?
Additional Reading
Epithaph For Digital Railroad – State of the Art
An interesting perspective on the close of Digital Railroad from DRR founder Evan Nisselson
Digital Railroad Special Offer – Photoshelter Blog
Details on how to transfer content from DRR to Photoshelter… if you still can.
[tags]PhotoShelter, Digital Railroad, archive, photography, business, Diablo Management Group, PSA, PSC, DRR[/tags]
“Pain, lot’s of pain”. Remember this one? Guess it was more accurate than even you thought at the time. I for once thought that DRR was doing much better than they actually were.
@Antonio I think a lot of people thought DRR was doing better than they were. I also think a lot of people have underestimated the impact of recent economic volatility. Hopefully there won’t be additional fallout, but I expect there will be.
From what it seems, DRR as a company was funded mainly by investment money and so was the PSC. The difference is that the regular Photoshelter Archive is owned by the owners hence they are still in business as a company.
Hopefully you get the money situation resolved Jim.
Richard, you are incorrect: there is no difference in the ownership of the Photoshelter Archive versus the ownership of the PSC. Both are run by the same company. This should be a lesson to all photographers to keep multiple copies of their digital works.
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I have been continually surprised to hear that photographers used DRR and PS Archive as their ONLY back-up. This strikes me as bad business all around.
Despite the name “PhotoShelter Archive” I pretty much think of this service as a “third back-up” as well as a search/commerce service for my web site.
Otherwise each image I create captioned and keyworded in my standard workflow, and should I decide to load them into a new service, assuming they extract IPTC metadata, there is no need to repeat this task.
And of course, everything is backed up on dedicated drives at my office. If the office burns, and PS Archive shuts down on the same day, I’m screwed.
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Were you left high and dry by Digital Railroad going bust?
I know a company that has a good piece of image library software – they do footage libraries too.
Big advantage is that you’ll own the software; I hear they are offering credit terms too.
Take a look at http://www.big-easy-footage-library-software.com
Were you left high and dry by Digital Railroad going bust?
I know a company that has a good piece of image library software – they do footage libraries too.
Big advantage is that you’ll own the software; I hear they are offering credit terms too.
Take a look at http://www.big-easy-footage-library-software.com and http://big-easy-image-library-software.com
Hi,
I thought DRR.net were a bad company and they only sold one picture and so I lost a lot of money on monthly fees for very little in return.
When I asked for an accrediation letter in 2007, they refused to supply one – an action that could have landed me in hot water – and were mostly awful people to deal with.
Not the case for all, of course, though I never even got any resolution of my dispute with them – trying to cancel my contract with them.
Agencies like drr.net are bound to go under, as they are more Internet than Photo people and managing these systems needs great skill, especially in the first three years of business.
Fotegrafik.com – another stock/software company may have a promising replacement in the coming weeks, which may not involve monthly fees and have a portal linked to it.
Still, passing on more to photographers is great, though not at expense of poor sales and marketing. Otherwise, things like drr.net become a burden.
I realised drr.net were rubbish a few months after signing the contract with them and then learning this was 12 months, like it or not! Which was not clearly explained at the time.
So I do not mourn the passing of drr.net, as I always thought them awful people to do business with and probably drinks too!
I use a normal stock agency, TopFoto.co.uk, with 7,000 pictures I make hardly US$200 a month and I think this business is pretty messed up and sadly not worth bothering with, as the returns are terrible for all the hard work required to build a good, professionally-edited stock image collection.