A few years ago I went to Spain. I took quite a few photos and I kept the ones that I liked and the ones that turned out decent.

Back then, I used Yahoo! for everything, especially My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail. Among other services they had this cool thing called the Briefcase, which allowed you to upload files onto their servers for either storage, or sharing, or for accessing these files from any computer connected to the internet. They even had a Yahoo! Drive, which mapped a network drive onto this Briefcase if you were using Windows 98.

Anyway… I decided to store these photos in a safe place, back then I wasn’t into burning, and picked Yahoo! Photos / Briefcase because I loved the idea of being able to access the photos anywhere, not to mention the sharing capabilities. It worked like a charm.

A few weeks ago, I decided to store on DVD all the photos that I had in my hard drive, and then I remembered that I had those others on Yahoo! and there I went to download my originals…

The original files were not there anymore.

Back in 2002 or 2003, they decided to move the files from the Briefcase’s Photo folder to their Yahoo! Photos service, and separated their storage almost physically: Things that you were able to access through Briefcase, impacted your Yahoo! Photos, and vice versa. After the separation, things were fully independent.

I wouldn’t have a problem with all these changes. If it works for them, good! As long as I can access my files, I don’t have a problem with this. And this is where it gets annoying…

In order for me to get to those files, the original ones, I need to be a Yahoo! SBC member. No way around. Living in the Midwest, it is close to impossible, or impossible to do that, because you need to live in a servicing area in order to become one.

I called Yahoo! Customer Service (no 800 number whatsoever), I emailed Briefcase Cust. Svc. as directed, they emailed back 3 or 4 times, with useless responses, until I finally got an email stating:

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

We have received your suggestions regarding Yahoo! Photos policies and
would like to thank you for your comments. In this particular situation
we have explained our policies and shared our product knowledge with
you. At this time we are unable to alter our policy or product, and
therefore unable to offer any further assistance.

Are you kidding me??? Those are MY PHOTOS!!!

Anyway… If anyone reading this has an idea on how to recover these photos… or if you have an SBC account and you think that you can help me with this… please throw me a line… seriously…

Update: I guess Yahoo! Photos is not the only Yahoo! entity with certain issues. Jeff Zeldman had some trouble with Flickr, but maybe bad publicity made them respond quick… I wasn’t as lucky.. and I still don’t have my photos.