Phanfare is paid photo hosting service that I had used for around 2-3 years in the past. Initially their service was superb and although it was among the costliest around, I didn’t mind paying that much for a fast and great photo hosting service. I had hosted tens and thousands of my photos through them. I also enjoyed some of their great features such as CNAME redirection, and usernames as part of the URL, which in effect made it really easy for me to share my photos with my friends. I even used to link my photos hosted on phanfare to display on my blogs. They had a great and a clean interface and very nice PC based tool that could be to used to upload photos online.
But then, in 2008 they decided to change.
They thought they should be as inconvenient, as self-focussed, as customer-unfriendly and as pathetic as the rest of the photo hosting services spread all over the internet. I think they stopped maintaining their desktop tool and it used to hardly work for me during the last few months that I was using it. Then they decided to change their backend so that the pictures that I had directly linked to from my blogs, were now at a different URL. So every single place that I used to display my pictures started showing up broken image place holders. That was the first straw. Secondly they decided that they wanted some sort of stupid community features and made it mandatory that user should also have accounts (at least free) in Phanfare in order to comment on other photos. Then they changed their URLs so that the simple username based URL became generated gibberish that one couldn’t easily share around. All in all a lot of changes that they thought the customers want without once taking a survery of the already paying customers. I have bought an account there because I liked some of the features that they were providing and it was very sad of them to just revoke those features that I am paying money for and throw some random crap at me that they felt I would like. Some mind readers or psychologists they thing they are?
I decided at once not to renew my subscription to them and though I had a lot many months to go, I disassociated their service with my domain and didn’t make use of Phanfare any further to store my photos. In June the subscription ended and I was happy that I didn’t have to waste so much money on them anymore. But the funny thing that formed the basis of this post was when an email came from them a few days back.
They have asked customers who have not renewed their subscriptions to come back and become paid members again. They have made offers to have username based URLs and even said that they are trying to bring back the CNAME redirection to their service. They have even tried to fool the members by saying that, for those who renew their subscription before a certain time, they would give unlimited disk space and after the offer period, even paid members would have size caps on their photo storage. Right… I would rather move elsewhere than pay you to impose a size limit on my photos. Anyway, this sounded like a cheap trick and a last ditch effort on their part to bring back unsatisfied customers. I suppose those who decided to stick in spite of all these issues would not even be considered for this offer since it was specifically directed to the ones who haven’t renewed.
Also at signup they said that, when a customer decides to terminate their subscription, they would give free DVD backups of the photos that the user had uploaded. Well, I have of course terminated my subscription and I don’t see any DVD coming my way and nor did I see any option to request for the same on their (now very dirty looking and cluttered) site. I don’t expect phanfare to last much longer when paid services like Smugmug were always more popular than phanfare and they didn’t do anything to upset their customers, on one hand, and on the other hand there are a lot of free and much more usable photo hosting services such as Picassa, Flickr and even Facebook, that are much faster and much much better.
That said, I am sticking to Facebook and Picasa and the next time I get such a mail from Phanfare, I will be immediately marking it as spam.
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Tagged: change, facebook, hosting, phanfare, photo album, picasa, storage