Photopost down (at long last)
 

Photopost is down (or at least the database is down) and they have a fist full of internal errors.
For years they have abused their customers and failed to update and secure the products. Photopost products were poor in scripting terms to start with, barely secure and at best put the host script at risk. The only reason I believe they survived so long was the fact that most who brought their products did a good job at promoting their forums and galleries... this in term trapped them and they had little choice but to stay with the sinking ship.

Normally I'm sad when a company gets in to trouble or restricts sales... Not in this case though. And I doubt anyone could blame this on trend change. I believe this is a direct result of how they abused their customer base to the point of self destruction.

I do feel sorry for all of those who are trapped in Photopost products and have no migration paths to follow.

It's been a long time in the making... I left PhotoPost some 9 years ago as the developer and after that Chuck was the only person left to maintain/support the product. The economics of the product made it difficult to be much more than a part-time gig.

Rip on it all you want, but for many years a lot of work went into making the product as useful as possible across a wide variety of platforms - something nobody else was doing. Yes, an integrated solution specific to each platform is ideal, but as those solutions learned it becomes a thankless and time consuming effort. PhotoPost was a great option that fulfilled a void for many year.

As for what happened the past half dozen years or so, well, I cant speak to that since I had zero involvement (including my accounts disabled across all properties), so I can only guess that it was left to died a slow death.

Photopost is a very old script and it's normal to have reached its EOL. The first version that I've bought back to 2001 was not even PHP but a cgi script. Around 2003 they released their PHP version.

Support was good but later on the author sold it (must be 2006-2007). The new owner (common happening) didn't took care to make it better, just tried to get more money from the big client base. Not 100% sure, but if I remember well on 2001 was the only Gallery script. Or at least the only good gallery script.

remember the legal battle with vbadvance and photopost.. way back they never picked up after that.

It's really a shame. I use this myself as do a couple of my clients of which use a hundred thousand images. Moving to another gallery is next to impossible.

One of the sites I manage has a rather large gallery running photopost. We're looking at moving to xenforo and converting everything over.