If you’ve been keeping up with business news, you’ve no doubt heard that Kodak is having some serious financial troubles. While the company has vigorously denied that it will file for bankruptcy, it has had to sell of some its intellectual property and is in serious need of a loan.
All of this raises an urgent question for those of us who store our photos on Kodak’s online service Kodak Gallery – are these photos safe? Unlike your cash deposits in a bank, there is no insurance on your photo “deposits” in an online service. If the service goes under, there’s no telling what can happen to your images (that said, there’s almost always a migration path to another service or the ability to download images/order a CD – we have yet to hear of any online service that simply deleted their users’ images without ample warning).
So, are Gallery images safe? We put the question to Kodak spokesperson Robin Carr and her answer was, in short, absolutely. Carr noted that the Gallery is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kodak and while it doesn’t report out its sales, “our product portfolio has been very well received.” Indeed, the company just announced its new lineup for holiday photo gifts.
Our take: One reason you shouldn’t worry about your Gallery images is that the company already provides a means for you to download the full-resolution file to your desktop (this is what makes the service so attractive in the first place). Kodak the parent company is struggling because it’s still saddled with a legacy business, but Gallery is in a growth market. You should, as a rule, always maintain multiple back-ups of your images no matter what online service you use but you shouldn’t worry about Gallery. At least, not yet.