Remembering Defunct Photo-Sharing Sites

Walk with me, if you can, down Memory Lane...

As ubiquitous and well-established as Instagram is today, it might be difficult for young folks to fathom a world without it. Before Instagram launched their services, though, there were other places where users could share photos, and Instagram merely emerged as a competing product in a sea of many others. They rose to fame quickly, due in part to their acquisition by media giant Facebook, and drove many of the other websites and apps out-of-business by their marketing strategy and mega-dollars to back it.

Today, I'd like revisit and reminisce about some of the alternatives that existed and disappeared before Instagram was founded, as well as one that came along about the same time. There are many photo-sharing sites that are still viable — such as Flickr, SmugMug, SnapFish, and Shutterfly — which will not be discussed here since they aren't defunct.

^{• PINWHEEL, PHOTO BY ME •} One of the ones I liked the best was SnapMyLife. Their logo was a stylized camera shutter, resembling a flower with different colored petals. One day when I was driving down a road, I saw a pinwheel in someone's yard and thought it somewhat resembled the SnapMyLife logo, so I had to take a shapshot. The other SnapMyLifers really enjoyed that pinwheel!

I don't remember when SnapMyLife launched, as it was well-established with a solid community when I discovered it in 2008 or 2009, and it definitely preceded Instagram. People from all over the world were on the site, so one could see photos from India, Australia, and many other places. Conversations took place in the comments beneath the photos as well as in private messages between users, and it was a vibrant community. It was easily accessible via the mobile-web for those without smartphones, but there were apps for those with such.

As happens to many good websites and apps, it was acquired by another company in 2010. The new owners overhauled the website and changed it so much that it wasn't fun anymore. While the overall design of the new website was top-notch in appearance, it wasn't so forgiving to people with slow Internet connections and took a long time to load because of all the behind-the-scenes scripts and features that were running. Perhaps they did this to attract a different demographic or to push the site towards more professional photographers, I don't know, but many of the old community bailed at that point. I don't even know if it is still going today or not, as I have not checked with them lately.

There was also Radar! What a cool site that was! It was running simultaneously as SnapMyLife, was easy-to-use, and had a vibrant community as well. The founders of that site even produced swag with the Radar logo — keychains, t-shirts, mugs, cozies, etc. — which were given away in contests. Some of the users even managed a few meet-ups in various places, and some of the users there were also on SnapMyLife. That site wasn't bought-out by another company, but was finally deemed unprofitable and shut-down, perhaps due to competition. Refugees from SnapMyLife and Radar created "groups" on Facebook to keep in touch and continue sharing photos.

Upon the loss of SnapMyLife and Radar, I went looking for other options and found Treemo. It was a very cool site, too, with an awesome sidebar to keep up with other photographers' posts while working on your own photo album. An announcement was made one day that the site was temporarily coming down for an upgrade, but that upgrade never appeared and I never learned what happened. It was definitely frustrating to see yet another good site disappear.

And then there was PicPlz, which had a fully-functioning website and a fantastic app for smartphones which made uploading and sharing photos easy and fun. One of the coolest things about PicPlz was the array of filters for instantly editing photos, and they had some filters which no other site had! PicPlz also kept the original upload on file and provided the edited photo, too, which was a fantastic service, as most sites only keep one instance of any uploaded photo.

Among my favorite filters there were: Instant Film, Cross-Processing, C-41, and 70s. One of the filters I've not seen anywhere else was called "Russian Toy Camera" which simulated the lomo-photography characteristic of many of the cheaper/low-end cameras that were made in the Soviet Union and other locales many years ago. I have since learned to simulate some of those filters, manually, with my PaintShopPro® editing software, but the manual techniques for some of the filters still elude me. An example of one of their filters is shown below — my original shot of the main street of a small town is below-left, and the image below-right is the same shot with the "70s filter" which makes the photo appear as if it were taken in the 1970s and aged as photo prints do over time. Fortunately, that is one of the easiest techniques to reproduce manually, and I like the appearance of softer light and the slight vintage-feel.