A recent e-mail from Eastman Kodak Co. didn’t lead to a Kodak moment for Vanessa Daniele. It got her angry.
On May 16, the company’s Kodak Gallery online photo service will delete her picture albums unless she spends at least $4.99 by then and every year thereafter on prints and other products.
That’s the new rule for people whose photos take up fewer than 2 gigabytes of space on Kodak’s servers — enough for about 2,000 1-megabyte photos. People over that limit must spend at least $19.99 a year. And customers who signed up under the old rules won’t be given a pass.
“I don’t ever think it’s a good idea to change terms of service on customers after they’ve signed up, and demand a new storage fee or threaten deletion of photos,” said Daniele, 26, who lives in Chicago.
Kodak Gallery, once known as Ofoto, said it wants to focus on its best customers, not folks who want to take advantage of free picture storage. Its new rules are hardly unusual in the online photo business.
But the company’s decision illustrates the risks people face relying on privately run services to host digital memories.
Daniele’s situation is complicated because the albums she organized and stored at Kodak Gallery are made up of pictures taken by friends and family and uploaded to the site by them. She doesn’t have copies stored elsewhere. Now those images would be deleted even if she makes purchases above the site’s new minimum but her friends and family don’t.
