My ties with Picturelife is over. It was over the day I exported all the photos out two months ago.
The previous blunder – where they leaked information of customers out, was already a warning sign. It’s serious enough to make me sit up and re-evaluate my options. Since StreamNation bought Picturelife over, development has stopped. I know what was coming.
I decided to export my photos. It’s just a matter of time.
The process was slow and lumbering. Tedious too, because I had the zip files are sorted by months, then years. There was no option to download the entire pictures (unlike my beloved Everpix). Imagine you had a huge collection, over many years. You have to click on every month, wait for it to generate the zip file, download them, and repeat this process for every month. That was how painful it was.
But that’s nothing compared to the plight so many Picturelife users. They can’t export their pictures out. It returns an error. Support is not responding. Even if they do, it’s a cut-and-paste reply that doesn’t help. It’s depressing to see how much such a popular photo service has fallen into.
As for myself, I was being charged despite canceling their premium subscription. I wrote in, never hear from them. I guess I never will. Though they are quiet in the public, it’s apparent that the service has gone belly up. But it’s nothing to the pictures many others have, unable to retrieve and export. They are helpless. I sincerely hope they have a local backup somewhere.
I wonder about the thousands and millions of pictures in their server. They belong to people – precious memories they entrusted Picturelife to upkeep but so dearly betrayed. I thought as a buying user, I’m directly contributing to their longevity.
But I was proven wrong, by another photo storage service I loved. Picturelife/ StreamNation, I thought you have better class than that.