Anyone use Fototime for photo hosting?

Hope you have backup copies of all your photos as do I.

Never heard of FotoTime. I have had good luck without glitches using WordPress, Google photos and several Facebook pages that all allow me to use wordy narratives with each and many photos for free.

They are all backed up, but that ain't the problem. I have thousands of photo links on the web that are all dead now. Just like the fototime link in my signature. I used fototime for 20 years and never had an issue until a week ago.

If you receive no answers here you might try IRV2 and Escapees RV forums and likely one of those can assist you. Good luck

BradW wrote:
They are all backed up, but that ain't the problem. I have thousands of photo links on the web that are all dead now. Just like the fototime link in my signature. I used fototime for 20 years and never had an issue until a week ago.

Only happened ONCE to you?

You are indeed very lucky.

Myself, have lost PAID and even free online storage three times over the last 10 yrs. Never lost my files as I always keep backup copies off line but it is a irritation losing many hot links to forums that I would rather not try to go back, find and fix..

Online storage comes and online storage goes..

They go belly up, they decide they are not making enough revenue by hosting free storage with hot linking and then they change TOS with no notification..

If you are looking for free pictures and document hosting, just setup a GMail account, free version comes with 15GB of online storage and supports hot linking/sharing.

Just setup a folder in the online storage and you can set that folder for sharing without password, now all of the items you place in that folder are shareable and you can generate a hot link for each file or the entire folder.

So far, using Google drive has been the most stable way I have found to share photos and other files that hasn't gone away YET.

Another possible place is by subscribing to dropbox, not sure if you can generate a hot share link without password though..

Fototime was a paid site. Worked great for 20 years.....then POOF!.....GONE!

It must not have been many people using it because I have found very little discussion about it online. I found a little discussion here: https://watchintyme.com/index.php?threads/%F0%9F%93%B8-fototime-down.732644/page-3 That's about it.

Since the Fototime crash I have put some photos up on Google Photo.

Any time you use photo-hosting, you take the chance it will either stay-up, or go-down. If it's important that you link to sites or family, I'd suggest you put up a website and install your photos. It's not very expensive. Then, you can link them anywhere you want - you can also make it a private site, and then make a share-page for the photos you share or post.

I'm not a tech, so can't explain how, but I do have my own site, and can share if I choose, or not. And unless the entire website host bites the bullet, then mine are as safe as the website. And, yes, I back everything up on SSD too.

BradW wrote:
Fototime was a paid site. Worked great for 20 years.....then POOF!.....GONE!

It must not have been many people using it because I have found very little discussion about it online. I found a little discussion here: https://watchintyme.com/index.php?threads/%F0%9F%93%B8-fototime-down.732644/page-3 That's about it.

Since the Fototime crash I have put some photos up on Google Photo.

As I mentioned, even paid online storage is not a certainty.

Myself, one of the online storage places I was paying for disappeared with no trace one day and gone was the 9 months of paid service that was left that I had paid for (I paid by the year).

Get used to it, you WERE very lucky to get 20yrs out of it as I only got 2.25 yrs out of the paid one I was using.

This is one of many reasons I refuse to depend on online storage for backup anything of my data..

I will say this, if you are planning to go ahead with another paid storage, research it, see if you can locate a real sticks and bricks address with a real working phone number that gets answered by a live body that is inside the USA.. That will eliminate a lot of outside the USA fly by nighters that standup cheap storage, take your money and fold when you are not looking..

BradW wrote:
Fototime was a paid site.

How much?

2oldman wrote:

BradW wrote:
Fototime was a paid site.

How much?

Does it really matter if the site is dead?

Most paid online storage will be setup in a "tier" arraignment, starting with the lowest data storage possible, data speed restrictions, simultaneous connections limits (amount of people that can connect at one time). Typically your going to see something like a max of 100GB storage for around $5-$10 per month with 5-10 simultaneous connections with hot link sharing URLs. The price goes up from there with more storage and less limitations.

Compare that to Google drive which comes with a GMail account, they give you 15GB of free online storage which is hot linkable shared and no connection limitations..

Need more, You can upgrade to a PAID account and get more online storage.. Not sure if the prices are current but a while ago, 100 GB was only $1.99 per month with Google drive and they had a max of 30TB you could upgrade to if you needed..

Best bet is to stick to the major "known" players, Google Drive, MS One Drive, Dropbox as those most likely are not going to pack it up and go out for lunch without you.. Although they too can decide to dump any service or feature they like in the future if they feel they are not making enough profit.

As for myself, yeah, I am not in any hurry to pay for an online service since the free Google Drive seems to work fine for me.. You can shrink/resize the photos down to fit a lot more on 15GB of space.. Additionally, there is no limit on Google accounts you can open, just setup another GMail email account and bam, 15 more GB of free space..

On edit, I should also note, that Google Drive, One drive and Dropbox are not limited to photos only, you can put pretty much any data file on those drives, PDFs, DOC files, spreadsheets, photos, Music or video files (your own copyrighted material)..

2oldman wrote:

BradW wrote:
Fototime was a paid site.

How much?

It was different prices for different levels. I probably had 10,000 photos and 20 videos on fototime. I think that was less than half of the storage I was paying for. I think it was about $35/yr.

And we paid $1,100 for our first house. It was a 1953 house trailer made by Pontiac Coach Company. The roof leaked and the floor had a hole big enough that the cat came and went on his own schedule. Life was good in them days. :)