Truprint - corrupt photos warning

bigbumbarbie

If anyone else here like me uploads photos to Truprint to get paper copies printed and has many albums on the site and thinks those photos are safe, think again - they are not.

I have over 60 albums of photos on the site - most have been printed but I always took comfort that in the event of a fire or flood that they were safe. I could see them, if I viewed them it offered me the chance to print them again so logically they were safe.

I was wrong - after a recent death in the family I tried to gather together all relevant photos in one place for an album for the family only to discover several dozen were "corrupted", ie I couldn't have them printed, a similar number were just blank and repeated attempts to print out one album were met with an error message saying I had to re-upload the entire album.

Queries to Truprint were met with a standard response each time, that I had to re-uplaod the photos. The one time I got further I was told it is in their small print that they will only store photos as thumbnails and without notice they can render your photos unprintable. They claimed photos stored on the site for years had become corrupted when uploaded and when I finally managed to gather together enough for the album sent me an entire packet of photos I had deleted from the shopping cart whilst omitting about 30 I had chosen individually.

As you can imagine, looking through photos of someone who has died is a painful experience - doing it 4 times has been horrendous. Thank you Truprint - all you ever did was photos and apparently now you don't even do that any more.

Jakg

I don't think it's really fair to expect a photo printing company to also act as a free-of-charge backup service forever - is this is something you want (and I don't blame you for wanting off-site backup) you really need to look into a proper online data storage solution.

yangptangkipperbang

Copy them onto a external HDD (or two) and get someone off site to keep them for you. Just check/update as required.

amiaspden

Flickr now offers 1TB storage for free.

bigbumbarbie

Jakg wrote: »

I don't think it's really fair to expect a photo printing company to also act as a free-of-charge backup service forever - is this is something you want (and I don't blame you for wanting off-site backup) you really need to look into a proper online data storage solution.

The whole point is it isn't free - you pay over the odds for printing and are actively encouraged to store your phots there with options to share and re-order the same prints again and again, in fact if you view your photos it offers you the chance to do that in many different ways, canvases and mugs as gifts etc. If you have a look, it's what they do - it's all they do.

One of the "corrupted" albums was from earlier this year, some of the re-uploaded photos then became "corrupted" an hour or so after successful upload. Agreed some were from2009/2010 but the problem seems to be across the board and it is not my end as in the first couple of runs photos were successfully re-ordered and by the 4th run they had become "corrupted" too.

I would say Truprint has a problem, probably an upgrade gone wrong but when they sell themselves as being able safely keep and re-print all your photos from years ago and they actually can't people should be made aware of it. Wedding photos, baby photos, I am sure I am not the only person who erroneously thinks they can re-order these pictures at any time.

shaun_from_Africa

bigbumbarbie wrote: »

The whole point is it isn't free - you pay over the odds for printing...

But there is no requirement to buy any prints or any of the other items they sell in order to use their online storage so of course it's free.
Anyone can set up an account and upload their photographs without having any intention of ever getting any online printing carried out and if you wish to do this then you don't have to give any credit card details.

bigbumbarbie

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

But there is no requirement to buy any prints or any of the other items they sell in order to use their online storage so of course it's free.
Anyone can set up an account and upload their photographs without having any intention of ever getting any online printing carried out and if you wish to do this then you don't have to give any credit card details.

I don't think you understand so let me spell it out for you: The point is I have bought the prints and I want to buy the prints again. I don't want free storage and am not looking for free storage, I am looking to buy with money, my money, photos that I have already bought, with money. Truprint keeps my photos once I have bought prints, invites me to buy copies of my photos, invites me to buy other things with my photos on which sometimes I also buy, with money, and a bi- product of all of this is their website has probably about 1,000 of my photos, sat there ready to view with the constant invitation to buy every single one of them again at any time and perhaps I am an idiot for thinking it but I thought if I needed to that I could buy all of my photos again. But I can't because at varying times since being uploaded, about 10% of my pictures have become "corrupted" - the number and indeed the photos vary each time I log on but ultimately I cannot order these prints again.

Others may not but luckily I still have pretty much all of these photos, on an assortment of devices dotted about, but because Truprint had them all in one place and all I had to do was log in and put them in my cart and because it seemed easy and I'd just suffered a bereavement and they seemed so ultra keen to charge me more money to have new copies made I foolishly relied upon their service. What an idiot I am.

I hope that is now clear and I hope that this will serve as a warning to others and now I will bid you farewell.

Money-Saving-King

bigbumbarbie wrote: »

I don't think you understand so let me spell it out for you:

I'm sorry but I don't like the way you spoke to shaun from Africa who was only trying to help so let me spell this out to you!!!

They do not advertise themselves to be a media storage solution anywhere one their front page.

I'm going to spell this out to you as well read their terms and conditions!!

http://www.truprint.co.uk/truprint/termsAndConditions

"3. Digital Image Storage

You should always preserve your original content, or make back-up copies of such content, on your personal system. You should not use the Service as the only repository or other source for your content."

Before you spell things out to people trying to help maybe you should read things that spell out the service you bought in the first place!! If there's anything else you don't understand or need spelling out please let me know

Fishingtime

Do what I did when someone close to me died.
I scanned all the pics then wrote them onto cd's and gave several people a disc for safe keeping

shaun_from_Africa

bigbumbarbie wrote: »

I don't think you understand so let me spell it out for you

I understand that you incorrectly stated that their photo storage facility was not free

The whole point is it isn't free -

and once it was pointed out that the storage of photo's is in fact 100% free of charge, you decided to throw your teddy out of your pram.

peachyprice

bigbumbarbie wrote: »

I don't want free storage and am not looking for free storage.

But that is what you are using Truprint for.

They are a printing service, not a storage service, most sensible people would store their photos on their own media or on a dedicated remote storage server, no somewhere where they could disappear in the blink of any eye.

What do you think is going to happen to your photos if Truprint decide to cease trading? They're not a storage service so they could just switch off their servers on day.