Camera Content Giant DPReview to be Shut Down and Archived

One of the internet’s most important and trusted camera review sites, DPReview, is being shut down in the coming weeks.

The site will be closing its digital doors as of April 10^th after 13 years of operation under ownership by Amazon.com and 12 previous years under its original founders.

Amazon is cutting the site as part of a wider mass of 18,000 planned layoffs announced in January of this year.

For those of you who are major fans of this deeply detailed camera review site, you can still enjoy new publications up to April 10^th. After that, the site will be locked down with no further updates planned. It’s also slated for takedown sometime after that.

However, if you’ve previously loved and used DPReview’s massive archive of old photographic gear reviews and content, archived versions will still be around.

For one thing, the Archive Team is already making an effort to archive the huge body of content that the site has created across its 25-year existence.

This group, which describes itself as “a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage,” works as a nonprofit wiki-style organization dedicated to saving notable content that’s in danger of vanishing from the web.

The even more famous Internet Archive has also been copying a vast trove of DPReview’s content since as far back as 2000. Their content captures have been particularly rich since the early 2010s right up to the present day.

In other words, there will likely still be plenty of useful older reviews and content left online because of these third-party archiving efforts.

As for Amazon itself, the company has admittedly run the site pretty well for over a decade, but it’s odd that it should consider this popular destination for all things camera-related to be a good choice for elimination.

Considering Amazon’s nearly $13 billion in operating income for 2022, the online retail and subscription giant should hardly have much trouble continuing to handle DPReview’s comparatively infinitesimal operating costs.

At the very least, you’d think that they’d be willing to keep an archived copy of the site’s existing content online for posterity, but no.

Instead, the announcement by the site ominously states that it “will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards.”

Subscribers to DPReview who had uploaded photos and text to the site during their memberships will be able to request a download of their content until April 6^th.

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