Webshots began in 1995 as a screensaver company in San Diego, selling a sports-themed product off retail shelves. Four years later the founders moved the software to the web, and the Webshots Community became one of the first photo-sharing sites built around public sharing. The trick was the desktop client: it downloaded fresh images every day and cycled them as wallpaper, so a photo uploaded by one member could end up on a stranger’s monitor within hours. It was a photo album with an audience built in.
A photo album with an audience
Members used it the way the design intended. Families and hobby photographers organized albums by subject — animals, landscapes, holidays — and by default those albums were public. Visitors commented, and regulars checked in daily to see what their photo friends had posted. One former member’s summary was simple: the contact and comments from other members were what made the site enjoyable, and many people who could not travel relied on others’ pictures to visit places they would never see. By 2004 Webshots was one of the largest photo destinations on the web. When CNET completed its acquisition that August, its SEC-filed announcement said Webshots had more than 14 million unique visitors per month and a publicly available collection of 66 million images.
Success made it a target. Excite@Home bought Webshots in 1999 for $82.5 million, then went bankrupt; the founders repurchased it for $2.4 million in 2002, sold it that October to CNET for $70 million, and CNET passed it to American Greetings for $45 million in 2007. Meanwhile Flickr won the bloggers, Facebook took over campus photos, and Photobucket became the default home for MySpace users. Each owner had different plans for the product, and none of them rebuilt the relationship between photographers and their visitors.
The shutdown scattered the collections
In October 2012 American Greetings sold Webshots to Threefold Photos, which relaunched it as a different service called Smile by Webshots. The old photo-sharing system ended that year. Webshots’ own current support page on the old community says member photos and albums from the 1999–2012 era were removed from its servers and were not carried into today’s system. Public albums survive only where outside archives captured them.
The community itself moved rather than died. A Flickr group called Webshots Community appeared the day after the relaunch announcement as a place where former members regroup, post photos “as they were once proudly displayed,” trade award links, and keep the conversations running. The relationships survived; the hosting did not.
What remains of the brand is a stripped-down version of the original. Webshots today is again a desktop wallpaper and screensaver product built around a curated library rather than member uploads. The engine that once gave amateurs an audience went back to being a screensaver.