Fotopedia

Fotopedia was a photo encyclopedia that, as of August 2011, had generated more than 51,000 pages and linked to over 755,000 photos.

Fotopedia
Screenshot
Fotopedia's landing page since the site's closure.
Type of site
Photo/Encyclopedia
Available inEnglish
FoundedOctober 10, 2008
OwnerFotonauts, Inc.
URLwww.fotopedia.com
Registrationoptional
LaunchedJune 9, 2009
Current statusClosed
Content license
Creative Commons or All Rights Reserved
The site's homepage while it was still operational.

Fotopedia was launched in June 2009 by five former Apple employees: Jean-Marie Hullot, Bertrand Guiheneuf, Manuel Colom, Sébastien Maury and Olivier Gutknecht.[1]

Members could create photo-driven articles which include Wikipedia and Google Maps information.[2] They were able to add a limited number of photos per day resulting in a high quality selection of photos.[3] The range of topics varied widely from precise locations, music bands or species to countries and famous people.[4] As well as taking part in the encyclopedia, professional and amateur photographers on Fotopedia could create albums to display their works, use Wikipedia articles to add context and to advertise popular albums.[5] Fotopedia also had several social networking features, such as a profile page and ability to interact with other users and content.[3]

Fotopedia supported Creative Commons licenses, enabling photos to be reused throughout the encyclopedia.[6] Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, was a board member.[5]

On July 31, 2014, Fotopedia announced it would be discontinued. Users had until August 10, 2014 to retrieve their data. After that, all data was deleted from the server. As a reason for the site's discontinuation, the founders listed that they believed "there [was no] suitable business in [the concept of storytelling] yet."[7] Three days before the deadline, the Evernote Corporation announced that users could sync their existing Fotopedia material with Evernote before the shutdown, free of charge.[8]

The Archive Team made a backup available on archive.org.[9][10] However, the pictures are not directly displayed, but assembled within archive files that need to be downloaded and extracted. The software used to copy the pictures from fotopedia.com to archive.org is available on GitHub.[11]

References
  1. "The Monde.fr: Checklist". Le Monde (in French). 29 September 2009.
  2. Leena Rao (June 9, 2009). "Fotonauts Emerges From Its Cocoon As Interactive, Web-Based Fotopedia". Tech Crunch.
  3. Jennifer Van Grove (9 June 2009). "Fotopedia: An Online Encyclopedia for Photos". Mashable.
  4. "Help - Fotopedia". Fotopedia. Archived from the original on 2010-06-20. Retrieved 2010-06-14.
  5. Stephanie Schlegel (June 9, 2009). "Fotopedia Launches the World's First Collaborative Photo Encyclopedia". Marketwire. Palo Alto.
  6. "Fotopedia Creates a Wikipedia-Inspired Online Photo Encyclopedia". LifeHacker.
  7. The Fotopedia team (July 31, 2014). "Fotopedia is shutting down". Archived from the original on July 31, 2014. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
  8. Dove, Jackie (8 August 2014). "Evernote offers a free safe haven for Fotopedia images". thenextweb.com. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  9. Archive Team (16 August 2014). "Fotopedia".
  10. elliot (August 9, 2014). "Fotopedia closes, but CC-licensed photos live on".
  11. "Fotopedia-grab". 30 January 2021.
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