Fotki

What is Fotki?

Fotki [fotki.com] is a photo-sharing website, online community for photographers, and social network founded in 1998¹. It supports profile pages, customizing themes for your profile page, creating albums, posting comments, favoriting photos, friending users, searching photos by hashtags, and writing journals (blogs).

Observations

Spooky Site

Although the website appears to be still functional with users still posting on it every day, there are signs it hasn't been updated in a very long time. In fact, I'm wondering what exactly is going on. It's spooky.

The login page has a section to sign up that lists photo hosting for blogs as a feature, but if you click on the link, which goes to https://host.fotki.com/, you get a message that reads "Sorry, but Fotki hotlinking service has been suspended indefinitely."

There's also a link to photo contests (https://contests.fotki.com), but the last contest "ended on January 25, 2015."

The testimonials page shows a template error.

The login form has a button to sign in with Google+, a defunct social media created by Google.

The last post on Fotki's official blog [https://journals.fotki.com/fotkicom/fotkiblog/] was in "2014-09-16," in which one of the features announced was "We finally were able to make drag and drop upload to work with IE11."

Two years prior the company was in need of cash to stay alive.

Don explained to us the problems at Fotki: 'We've been online for 14 years and, until 2008, everything went well. We took on staff, we opened an office. In 2008 the economy collapsed and the iPhone came out. People started using their mobile phones to take pictures and uploaded them to other sites - they didn't need Fotki for that. Revenue started to go down and we had to cut salaries, then fire people, then close the office. We are a small business - a family company. We don't have investors to turn to.'

'It got to the stage that, if we didn't do something fast, there would be no site - everyone would lose everything. What we've been trying to do is find a way to stop that happening. The only thing we can optimize is our hosting.'

Troubled Fotki thanks subscribers for support and says photos are safe [https://www.dpreview.com/articles/9300600246/fotki-has-future-and-will-allow-originals-to-be-downloaded] (accessed 2024-10-14)

I'm wondering how is Fotki still alive, 8 years later, when it appears to have been completely abandoned. I've seen people say Flickr is a ghost town. This is a real ghost down. This is actually spooking me out. It's a social media that refuses to die. It outlasted Google+. Will it outlast Instagram?

There are signs people actually use it even in 2022, so it's probably still working.

I still use Fotki and am happy with it.

"Posted by GMorrison on Tuesday, July 26, 2022 3:39 PM" [https://cs.finescale.com/fsm/general_discussion/f/50/t/190935.aspx] (accessed 2024-10-14)

Dmitri Don, Fotki's founder, created an album called "Testing" in 2022. What was he testing? What does this mean? Why testing?

Video-Sharing

Profiles have a section called "My Web Videos" where their Youtube videos may be posted. The platform doesn't seem to support video hosting.

Creative Commons

Fotki supports Creative Common licenses, however it doesn't implement the appropriate metadata to be findable on Google image search results. In fact, it doesn't implement any metadata at all (ipernity at least used rel="license" in its licnse links). Fotki is also not listed as a source in the OpenVerse search engine.

Pricing

Fotki offers various pricing plans for its members.

	Free	Premium S	Premium M	Premium L	Premium XL	Business L	Business XL
Storage	70 MB+	300 GB	600 GB	4 TB	6 TB	4 TB	6 TB
Price (monthly)	$0	$1.53	$3.08	$6.17	$9.60	$7.70	$13.17

Notes:

• Information about the free plan found here [https://help.fotki.com/848/]. It says you can request extra 50 MB of storage every month.
• Information on the premium and business plans found here [https://secure.fotki.com/payment/view/]. There doesn't seem to be a difference between Premium and Business features despite them being priced differently.

References

1. https://members.fotki.com/dmitri_don/about/ (accessed 2024-10-14) ↩︎