Ipernity is a non-commercial photo sharing community which is financed exclusively by membership dues without any intention of making a profit. By means of the Ipernity Members Association, the community operates its own website for the protected private exchange of digital content such as photos, videos, audio files and blogs, as well as for the worldwide publication of selected content. Within its groups, ipernity promotes the mutual inspiration and cross-border communication supported by a machine-aided translation. Since ipernity's web service is 100% members-owned, it is unaffected by external interests, especially those of investors. It is exclusively geared to the needs of the community. The privacy and contents of users are particularly protected at ipernity. Only those contents that are expressly approved for publication by the users appear in the results of search engines. Private data and content will in no way be analysed, passed on or sold for commercial purposes. The website is in direct competition with Flickr and is therefore readily compared with it. However, it stands out due to a slightly larger range of functions. According to the portal trusted.de, ipernity's service is among the seven best photo sharing services.
Origins
Ipernity originated in 2005, when the two French programmers Christophe Ruelle and Christian Conti set about programming a photo sharing platform. A first test version was put into operation in 2006, followed by the public beta version in 2007. In December 2008, ipernity proved to be the best photo sharing platform at the second annual Open Web Awards by Mashable. The name of the website consists of "IP" and "eternity". In order to finance further development, the website was listed on the Paris Stock Exchange in July 2009. This resulted in a relaunch in April 2013, which was largely oriented towards the functions of Flickr at that time and went into competition with them. Shortly thereafter, Flickr changed its layout, which prompted many of its users to move to ipernity. Ipernity also benefited from the demise of the photo sharing servicePanoramio between 2014 and 2016.
At the end of 2016, the former operating company Ipernity S.A. informed users to have to discontinue the service on January 31, 2017 for economic reasons. Dedicated users then took the initiative to continue the website on their own. They negotiated a moratorium with Ipernity S.A. in order to consider various options for its continued existence.
Ongoing operation of the website by the members
On January 10, 2017, the idea was born to found a non-profit organization - the Ipernity Members Association - in order to continue to operate the website on their own initiative. This idea was communicated to users on January 26, 2017. At the same time, a survey was conducted to determine to what extent users would support such an operator model financially. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Within 15 days, 117% of the planned funds that were necessary for the continued operation of the website were collected via crowdfunding. After the founding of the Ipernity Members Association on February 20, 2017, an asset deal was negotiated with Ipernity S.A. and fixed contractually in May 2017. Since September 1, 2017, the website has been operated independently by the community. The last liabilities from the asset deal were repaid at the end of January 2018. At the same time, an external IT service provider was commissioned to maintain the software and adapt it to new requirements. In December 2018, after an announcement on October 26, Ipernity deleted 5.8 million files, for a total of 14.6 TB, from free accounts which went over the storage limits and therefore had "invisible content". The deleted content amounted to almost half of the total hosted by the service and left 18,000 free users and 1300 members with some content.
