Consumers can be stuck when websites change terms
— -- 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 less than 2 gigabytes of space on Kodak's servers — enough for around 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. "That action doesn't value the customer or attract new ones."
Kodak Gallery, once known as Ofoto, said it wants to focus on its best customers, not folks who merely want to take advantage of free picture storage. And its new rules are hardly unusual in the online photo business.
But the company's decision to change its policies illustrates the risks people face as they increasingly rely on privately run services to handle their digital memories and communications. These services often state in the fine print that they can change the rules at any time, and users have little recourse when they do.
Many online photo services offer free storage of images as a way to lure customers who might buy prints or things like mugs with pictures imprinted on them. One such site, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Snapfish, offers unlimited storage to users who make an annual purchase of any amount.
These sites typically store users' original, high-resolution files on their servers, and display only lower-resolution versions that are fine for Web viewing but might not be clear enough for good prints. So users who fail to keep copies of their original picture files might have no way to get them back from a website without paying extra for the service.
