Exodus - moving away from Multiply.com

As I briefly mentioned in my previous post a little over a month ago, I was very saddened the decision of Multiply.com to discontinue it's blogging and photo hosting services and to solely focus on e-commerce. Being effectively my first *true* endeavor into the world of online social networking, mcwk.multiply.com (no point placing  hyperlink to it now) was my staging ground for cross-posting to marvinchong.blogspot.com.

It looks like the current CEO of Multiply, Stefan Magdalinski, who recently took over when the company moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, has made himself very unpopular with this decision. Perhaps it is his long experience in e-commerce (you can read a bit about his profile on the Multiply Corporate Info page) or maybe, Stefan opted to steer Multiply away from direct competition, given the gargantuan competition that is Facebook (for now)?

In any case, it is good that as what can be deemed the last meaningful act (at least to bloggers on Multiply like myself), Multiply has just put together an export tool and media download tool to facilitate our efforts to *abandon ship*. Though I feel they should have this developed BEFORE deciding to drop the bomb (rather like starting to build life boats after the ship hit the iceberg), I think that at least we should be grateful to Stefan and the Multiply team for fulfilling their moral obligation to their long-time user base.

So, let's see what the tools look like, and just how to go about using it?

From your multiply site, under your profile, you'll find 3 tools:

• Download Media
• Export to Blogger
• Export to Tumblr

The export tools here aren't very useful, as you'll have to manually download and upload your photos and videos to Blogger:

So, how do we go about doing that? Clicking on the "Download Media" link brings up the following Multiply Media Download page:

Here, the individual links to all the picture and videos you've ever uploaded to Multiply are given. Now, either you have to right click and "save as ..." each link, or use a dedicated download manager. Instructions given are for using the Download Master chrome extension or DownThemAll! for Chrome and Firefox Browsers respectively. If you're an adamant Internet Explorer user, you may need to use a 3rd party stand-alone download manager like Free Download Manager and wxDownload Fast. Both of them are available as portable apps at PortablApps.com. In my case, I'm using Firefox, so:

The size of your *baggage* will vary, depending on how long and how you use Multiply. In my case, I have 4793 photos to download. Luckily I'm using a download manager....

So, clicking on Start! I now wait patiently for all files to be mass downloaded to my PC. Needless to say, this takes quite awhile and a huge bandwidth too. So, be sure to do this from an AC powered laptop or desktop, and over a broadband connection without quota (like TMNET's Broadband or UniFi). And of course, make sure you have enough space on your hard disk.

While I'm sure you have all the originals backed up already, just like I do, it's more convenient to download your media this way, for re-upload to Blogger, Facebook or your new found platform of choice, rather than having to retrieve and re-edit for web publishing all the photos and videos from your archive. Obviously, this takes a long time. I'm typing this post and making the screen shots as well during the download process, and now it's ~85% complete. At least it will be done soon.

So, what's next? I think I'll leave my Multiply site alone here and let it die a natural death (or rather, killed off by Multiply when they finally discontinue the blogging service on 1st December 2012). The next huge task will be to check my site marvinchong.blogspot.com, which was heavily built by cross-posting from Multiply, and manually replace the photos that a currently hosted on Multiply. As for galleries, I don't have a simple solution yet, anyone out there with tips to share?

Well, all good things come to an end, and I thank Multiply for serving as a great entry-point for me into the world of blogging. I am sad that come 1st December 2012, there will be no longer any trace of mcwk.multiply.com in cyberspace to serve as a legacy. Anyway, thanks the Stefan and the Multiply team for allowing for ample time for us to part under favorable terms. I wish all of them best of luck and success in their future endeavors!