An Unpleasant Surprise

I'm really, really hoping this is temporary...

When I began sharing my sewing online on PatternReview, I used photoworks.com to host the photos. We were taking photos w/a conventional camera and having them developed; Photoworks automatically posted them online so I could link to them. It was a little awkward to do, but it was possible.

Two years into it, they reformatted everything and all the links went away. It took them about 8 or 9 months to have all the photos available again to fix the links.

I started using yahoo photos in the meantime; but as the pictures at photoworks became available I started re-linking...with the caveat that I had to link an entire album instead of just a photo. So I made albums of one photo when necessary; the old reviews I linked to an album w/a year's worth of sewing, with a note indicating what photo number that specific review referenced. Awkward, but at least there were photos linked. I used Yahoo for new photos in which only one linked to a review; for reviews that had several photos I linked to a Photoworks album.

The Yahoo photos went away; I moved everything on yahoo to flickr. Which has limits. So, photoworks became the archive for flickr; I keep about 2 years worth of photos on flickr, then move the older photos to phototworks a year at a time and link the year in an album as before.

But several months ago I noticed that the phototoworks slideshows linked to the reviews weren't working; the first picture in the album would come up, but none of the rest would. Photoworks had redone the slideshow format and the old one didn't work anymore. So, I began re-linking the albums as I encountered them.

Then, today I clicked on a photoworks link on one of my reviews and got a dead-end error page. 'The page you are looking for does not exist'.

So I went to photoworks and discovered that they have revamped the whole site. Again. The option to share just a link seems to have gone away; now I have to email someone. So I'm back to emailing myself the links to the albums so I can post them to the reviews.

And it looks like I'm going to have to go back and re-link all those reviews; once I figure out which ones are linked to photoworks and which ones are linked to flickr and which ones are linked to picasa (which, I discovered, is where all the photos uploaded to blogger go).

Rats.

Unless this is temporary and the links will be restored once photoworks conversion is complete.

But, given their past non-support of external links, I hold virtually no hope of that being the case.

Double rats.

ETA:

I did receive a reply to my query to customer service about links:

Thank you for contacting PhotoWorks. I am sorry to tell you that due to the recent site upgrade, previous links to images will not work any longer. It is no longer possible to link to photos stored in your photoworks account. You can do so through WebShots, Picasa, or another photo hosting site. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Please contact us if we can be of further assistance.

I did use photoworks when I wanted prints of our photos...since they were kind enough to host my pictures, then I gave them the business of printing my photos.

No more. Target can do it. Pity.


ETA again...well, the link I sent to myself from the Photoworks album does appear to link to the album ok...perhaps I can still keep things as they were. But I'm still going to have to relink a bunch of reviews....