In the past I have used (many times) Photobox to get prints from digital photos, and they have been very good - the prints are generally very good, even given my lack of photographic ability.
However, recently (June ish?) they have “upgraded” their website, and all seems to have gone to pot for me since. It started off last Friday (25th July) when I was trying to get some pictures from my albums like this:
- Login to Photobox
- Use the “Albums” dropdown and select the album I want
- Click the thumbnail to go to the individual image page
- Click the image to view the full size version so I can save it locally.
Easy? Not so - unfortunately, several things went wrong, though on a sporadic basis - sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t.
- Problem 1: The album sometimes didn’t bother loading the thumbnails - so you’re left on page 1 (of 2!) with apparently no pictures in the album. A reload often fixed this.
- Problem 2: Clicking on the thumbnail (when visible…) often results in an error page like that at the top of this post!
- Problem 3: If you manage to get the individual image page to load (after having a few goes) then it sometimes takes you back to your main screen (http://www.photobox.co.uk/my) instead of loading the image as expected.
Slightly pissed off by the fact it took me an hour to get copies of 10 images, I braved customer support. Apparently (after consulting technical), some of my images won’t be visible because they are moving servers. And, very true - in some of my galleries, there are images and thumbnails that are missing - which is fine if they subsequently reappear.
However, I’m not sure how (unless they have some oddly behaved, and not very resilient load-balanced image storage servers) you can have an image load during one attempt and then subsequently fail in another. It also fails to explain the rather spurious redirects I was getting, and the complete failures in populating the galleries on occasion.
This looks suspiciously like a fob off, or at best, support/technical who don’t understand what the issues are.
The troubles continue
Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, I now (as of Thurs 31st July) cannot even login to Photobox. In Firefox, I get the rather odd: “Content Encoding Error“, while in IE6 I get a blank page with just the following code in the source:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
Attempting to do anything else during this session after trying a login will throw the Photobox Error Page again, and so you are stuffed. Strangely, other people can apparently login, but they are suffering from problems with whole albums of images being unavailable, and are waiting on responses from photobox support…
Hmmm. Anyone know of any other good online printing services?
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Ok - after another call to support (and still awaiting a response after saying they are looking into the problem), it looks though I can login again. However, I now have no images in any of my albums. Hmmm.
Finally! They fixed it but haven’t got back to me about it. Except they sent me a survey: “We’d like to know why you haven’t ordered from us since we changed the site…”. Duly filled out with great pleasure.