NEW YORK, NY (October 29, 2008) – Photographers who were trying to download their archives from Digital Railroad on Monday evening when the Web site went dark and the FTP servers stopped working may be encouraged to learn that some back doors to the site and links to a client log in may still exisit.
Allen Murabayashi, CEO of PhotoShelter, and the PhotoShelter staff are trying to spread the word on message boards and via eMail that some photographers, even today, have found a link to get in and recover their files despite a period of time on Tuesday when files were not only unavailable, but had been replaced with "blanks."
Many photographers, like Melissa Farlow and Randy Olson, freelancers who shoot for National Geographic and other major magazines, were trying to FTP their files off Digital Railroad's servers Tuesday night when the FTP function failed.
"Around 12:30 p.m. PST last night it happened," Murabayashi said. "The photo files that people were downloading were replaced with a blank JPEG file that said 'Image Unavailable.' We're not sure why it happened, but now it looks like the photo files are transferring again, but we don't know how long DRR might be staying up."
Murabayashi said that this morning users found that if they clicked on the DRR.NET logo on the upper left of the site's now-dark home page (www.digitalrailroad.net), there was a way to log into their account.
"We don't know if this is someone doing the photographers a favor or what, or how long it will last," Murabayashi said. "We've been fielding literally hundreds of calls from photographers around the world since Digital Railroad put up the notice that they were going dark in 24 hours. The staff was here until 2 a.m. in the New York office answering phones."
"We've had calls from photographers who say they just joined Digital Railroad and who say they just paid their dues for a year," Murabayashi said.
PhotoShelter's CEO said in the days leading up to Digital Railroad shutting down the staff at PhotoShelter was concerned about whether photographers would be able to recover their images from the failing company's servers, whether photographers would get paid for sales, or whether anyone at Diablo Management (the liquidation company that took over Digital Railroad) would give the photographers the time needed to get their files.
"Our goal in all this was to see that photographers get their photos," Murabayashi told News Photographer magazine today. "There's a lot of fingerpointing going on right now and it's unclear who is in control [at Digital Railroad or at Diablo], and it's been difficult trying to negotiate some extra time for photographers. Of course some people are going to say we're being selfish (for trying to get Digital Railroad's clients), but we also share in the industry's concerns that these people didn't have enough time."
Alejandro Pagni, a photographer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, wrote on the SportsShooter.com message board that he received an eMail from Digital Railroad on Tuesday announcing the shut-down and that he "immediately" tried to migrate his image archive without success. "All services of DRR are congested and saturated. Long queues of pictures waiting to move for syndication to other services. Nothing reached in time. It is shameful," Pagni wrote.
Murabayashi said that last week when the PhotoShelter staff "thought things were going to go bad" they went online to the Digital Railroad site and to their membership directory and "clicked on every single name and eMailed them to tell them to get their stuff off the Digital Railroad system." Murabayashi said, "We were the only source of information for a lot of these people."
Asked whether PhotoShelter had been in talks with Digital Railroad or Diablo about buying the failing company, Murabayashi said, "Let's just say we were in the process of trying to negotiate a favorable outcome ... whether that was an acquisition, or trying to get them to keep the site up longer, there were a number of options. Everyone was surprised, including Digital Railroad's venture capitalists, that the switch was turned off like it was. We know that part of the problem is that there was no cash left in the business, and there are competing concerns about legal liability [with keeping the site up].
"Unfortunately, in this situation, the photographer/customer's needs were ranked very, very low," Murabayashi said. "It would be impossible to prove or disprove, but I think there was a hope that some deal would come across the desk [before the site went dark], but the communication has been very poor and that hampered any ability to have a smoother transition plan."
Any assets liquidated from Digital Railroad would go to the bank who holds the note on their loan, WTI, and the venture capitalists who funded Digital Railroad receive nothing. "That's one of the reasons the board of directors resigned when they did," Murabayashi said. "They no longer had a stake in the company."
Earlier today Digital Railroad founder and former CEO Evan Nisselson, who was the company's chairman of the board up until last week, confirmed from Milan that he had made at least two failed attempts in the past two weeks to reacquire the company he started four years ago. But the financial and credit crisis on Wall Street that spread to the global investment community made it impossible to raise sufficient funds to buy back Digital Railroad, Nisselson told News Photographer.
Nisselson said that after the last failed attempt to raise the money, Diablo Management stopped returning his eMails and did not acknowledge his advice that photographers would need sufficient time to be notified and to download their images, more than 24 hours certainly, since many of the clients travel the world on assignment and are in places for long periods of time where they may not have Internet access or even learn of the pending shut-down.
