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

[Adina P]

Open up a separate tab or window with a photo from the album, then delete the album. Then refresh the window/tab with that individual photo. If it still exists, deleting the album didn't delete it. If it's gone, it did.

[F, Calla & Luca]

I did an experiment. deleting an album doesn't seem to delete the picture(s) in it sadly. I made an album with a photo of the doodles which is on the front page. I deleted the album but the photo still appears in all photos and my photo. What a pity because deleting each picture is very tedious.

[Camilla and Darwin]

Thank heavens, I'm getting very angry at my past self for having uploaded so many photos. I've been deleting between classes and work since yesterday and It's getting tiring. LOL

[Lynda Kamrath]

Yes, it definitely is time to clean house.   I have too much on my page and will delete anything that is repetitive and large files.  I can delete at least 50 photos and will just save the ones I like best.  Groups?  Why be members of groups you do not participate in?  Okay, I will clean house and everyone should do the same.  I think it would be fine to delete all old conversations over 2 years old (or make your own deadline).  How about members who have not participated for years?  Start chopping and it think you can solve this problem.

[Adina P]

Lynda,
Conversations don't take up any significant space....they are tiny blips.  DO NOT delete those.
And groups exist whether or not you are a member, it won't do any good to leave them unless you want to anyway (it won't change our data storage volume).  Photos, videos and music are the things that use up a lot of space.  Just focus on those.

[Lynda Kamrath]

Thanks.  Videos and music, I have not done unless the Smileboxes are considered videos and music.  Photos, I can delete, and my camera shoots at huge resolution these days.  Photos are 20 MB these days and used to be 200 kb.  I would say that is a change.

[Adina P]

Yes large photos are probably a big reason.  Good reason to shrink them before uploading.  I think Smileboxes are safe because they are embedded from another site, we don't store them here.

[F, Calla & Luca]

Some of us refer others back to old, informative discussions at times.

[Nancy, Ned, Clancy, and Charlie]

I deleted lots of photos last night, but have a long way to go before I am done . . .  I still have over a thousand photos.  OMD! I can't bring myself to delete any of Gordie yet, but at some point I will edit those also.

[Adina P]

If you've done lots, great. Thank you. You don't have to go down to nothing. You don't have to delete Gordie.

[David Sands]

Hello, new here to the sife/forums- I process all my photos with OnOne Software and their resize app/program they have, it has a preset for "social medial/blogs" that take them all down to decent resolution but not monster files for showing on forums like this. Are these (re)sized files also a culprit that isconsuming data or is it mainly those large, oversized files that just sometimes get put up without being formatted for size and viewing? Just curious- I am a photographer and joined specifically for the photo forum to converse with other Doodle owners- so far in my 1st day on here have met some nice folks and seen some great photography....

[Adina P]

All the photos add up, but re-sizing as you are doing is tremendously helpful.  It feels utterly ridiculous to even have to do this whole "help us clean up" thing.  But so is the platform's sudden 10x price increase based on our storage volume.  We saw no other way. I think once we get MANY old photos from long inactive members removed we'll be okay.  I have a feeling a lot of the early photos I've been deleting were much smaller in file size than the ones in the past few years.  And with awesome members like you re-sizing before uploading, it will all work out.