We have some Good news and some Bad news and need your help...

[Adina P]

We have some good news and bad news about DoodleKisses.com.

The good news is that we plan for DoodleKisses.com to continue on happily supplying us all with our doodle addiction.

The bad news is that the company that runs our website platform recently increased prices exponentially based on site data storage. They did this with very little advanced notice so we have a very short time to make some changes. Our choices are to either pay the new fee with it’s over ten-fold increase in monthly costs OR decrease the amount of old data we have stored.

We are choosing to decrease old files we have stored. Mostly because we think we can do this without any real difference in how you experience DK. We will be making a few changes to decrease our site data storage and we need your help in the next two weeks. Our goal is to remove 5 GB of data. To put this in perspective, it’s about 1% of what our site contains. We will keep you posted on our progress. The main culprits are videos and photos.

Deleting discussions is not something we will be doing as it has almost no impact on the amount of data stored. Words and discussions just aren’t big files! We plan to do this reduction in phases where we only move on to the next phase ONLY if we have not decreased our data storage sufficiently with the actions thus far.

Phase One: Ask members to remove redundant / old photos and videos that you have uploaded. We don’t want you to remove your good stuff! We just want to remove files if you have multiple similar images/videos, etc. If we reduce enough here, we’re done!

Phase Two: If we need further cuts, we will dig deeper with your own personal cuts. Again, we really don’t want to remove anything useful or good. Just old extraneous stuff. Start identifying old and low quality images/videos from long inactive members and removing those.

Phase Three: We as admins will remove videos and photos we see as extraneous.

We’ll keep you posted on how we are doing. Thank you for your understanding and help!

Adina & Clark

[Ricki and Tara (doodle)]

I just removed all of my music files and some photos. Will get back to the photos later and may be able to remove more. 

[Christine & Shelby]

Thanks for the notice.  I will take a look at my stuff too - and likely save my blog posts somewhere else... it is great documentation of Shelby's first couple of years and I would hate to lose that. 

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

I have definitely been a photo hog.  Going to clear out now.

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

OMD! Deleting one by one is tedious!!!! I have deleted 6 pages of photos so far and I am not close to being done.

[Jane, Guinness and Murphy]

I deleted most of my music (I had a lot) and all the duplicate photos....hoping that's good enough.

[Laurie, Fudge, and Vern]

I will get to work on my stuff, too, although I try to never hog space with pictures of Fudge and Vern :) LOL

[Adina P]

Good work guys!  I deleted photos through 2.5 3 episodes of Scandal last night.  That's a lot of time.  Between me and all of you who were clicking away, we managed to get under our limit by about 10pm PST last night!  We still have a ways to go so that we have reduced enough to have a buffer, but if you have already removed photos/videos/music, you can rest!

I think going forward it's a good idea to be judicious about your photo uploading.  Just don't upload boat loads at once, avoid duplicates, and avoid 15 photos that look nearly identical.  Of course, I do not plan to be policing this.

If you have a great video to share, upload it to YouTube first, then you can embed the YouTube video here or link to it without using significant DK data storage for it.

[Carol and Banjo]

I got rid of some pics, all music (except one song) and quite a few videos.     Anytime I do upload a new photo or photos, I'll delete that same number.   Easey Peasey!

[Adina P]

You can do that, you don't have to.
Sounds like what we (try) to do with kids and their toys.  Yet somehow their toys keep multiplying.

[F, Calla & Luca]

Can whole albums be deleted at once?

[Adina P]

You can delete an album, I'm not sure if that means all the photos vanish or not.

[F, Calla & Luca]

I don't know but clicking on the cover picture. Gives you the option to delete the album and it feels good. I will do some research into this :-)