About Us
All About Mission Control
In the Beginning...
Fotopic.Net was the brainchild of husband and wife team Joel and Nicky Rowbottom, and began life on 2nd August 1999 as Photos.jml.net. The site engine proved extremely popular, with many others wanting to use it for their own photographs - and so Fotopic was created.
Fotopic has grown from strength to strength in the last 6 years and is used by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. We now have tens of millions of images in our database. Contributors to the codebase include staff from many other Internet successes, with the input from many professional and amateur photographers. Feature requests, ideas and comments from our users are continually helping us to build and develop to ensure that we can continue to serve the needs of the Fotopic community.
Milestones
| 1999 | Jul: | Original photos.jml.net designed by Joel & Nicky Rowbottom. |
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| 2001 | Feb: | Fotopic opened to the public |
| May: | Fotopic v2 launched - includes web-based uploading, customisable themes, and basic statistics. | |
| Nov: | Fotopic v3 launched - includes new look and feel, faster publication, statistics, and reporting. | |
| 2002 | Aug: | Fotopic reaches 100,000 images online. |
| Oct: | Fotopic v4 launched - includes better image quality, groups, print ordering, mobile phone uploading, WAP and more themes. | |
| Dec: | Sunday Times journalist Nigel Glover recommends Fotopic for online galleries. | |
| 2003 | Jan: | BBC News Online hails founder Joel Rowbottom as a "pioneer" of mobile telephone imaging - mobile phone images now account for 10% of all photos published each month. |
| Mar: | Fotopic reaches 250,000 images online - up to 3,500 new photos are published each day. | |
| May: | Fotopic begins providing a print service for professional photographers, direct from Fotopic galleries. | |
| Jun: | Half a million user photographs are now online, peaking at 5,800 photos a day. | |
| Sep: |
Over a million photographs online, peaking at 12,000 photos a day. Equipment Community launched, showing preview photos from hundreds of cameras on Fotopic. |
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| 2004 | Jan: | 2 million photographs online, peaking at 18,000 photos a day. |
| Feb: |
Gallery system v5 launched, with new Pro features. Fotopic.net exhibit at Focus On Imaging show at Birmingham NEC. |
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| May: |
Printshop launched, enabling Fotopic Premium users to sell their prints. 30,000 photos a day published. Fotopic move into new offices in Wakefield to cope with expanding operations, and a new workshop is built. |
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| Jul: | Fotopic begin accepting mobile phone submissions via multimedia messaging from all 5 major UK networks, with site publishing in less than 1 minute direct. | |
| 2005 | Feb: | My.Fotopic control panel version 6 is launched at the Focus on Imaging show, coinciding with over a million photos a month published, 10 million photos live in the system. 2,500 new users every week are joining Fotopic, culminating in over 100 million hits. |
| Sep: | Printing introduced on Agfa Sensatis Paper, using a new high-specification lab. | |
| 2006 | Jan: | Fotopic launches a new mid-tier subscription level - Fotopic Plus. |
| Feb: | Fotopic celebrates its 5th Birthday with a special Fotopic Plus promotion. Fotopic has well over 18.8 million photos in over 640,000 collections. We've come along way in 5 years! | |
| 2007 | June: | With the delivery of a brand new Agfa d-Lab.2, Fotopic begins a high-quality in-house print service. |
| Sep: | Fotopic launches a tie-in applcation in conjuction with Facebook, to embed your gallery within your Facebook profile. |
