Photo-Sharing Site Twitpic Is Doomed After All

It's been a pretty tumultuous couple of months for photo-sharing site Twitpic.

Early last month, the company announced that it was shutting down on Sept. 25, citing a trademark dispute with Twitter. A couple weeks later, the company announced that it had been acquired, and would no longer be shutting its doors.

In a blog post on its site today, Twitpic founder Noah Everett announced that Twitpic is, in fact, shutting down after all:

It's with a heavy heart that I announce again that Twitpic will be shutting down on October 25th. We worked through a handful of potential acquirers and exhausted all potential options. We were almost certain we had found a new home for Twitpic (hence our previous tweet), but agreeable terms could not be met. Normally we wouldn't announce something like that prematurely but we were hoping to let our users know as soon as possible that Twitpic was living on.

I'm sincerely sorry (and embarrassed) for the circumstances leading up to this, from our initial shutdown announcement to an acquisition false alarm.

The post also offers a link with how to export all your photos you have on the site. It's limited to only the most recent 5,000 pictures.

TechCrunch's Josh Constine says that the tool is lagging right now, but that's probably because a flood of people are trying to download their photos at the same time.

Twitpic has been around since 2008 and allowed you to share photos on Twitter long before you were natively allowed to do so from within Twitter. It's also one of the only ways to tweet out animated GIFs on popular Twitter feed readers like TweetDeck.

The dispute that led to the end of Twitpic has to do with trademarks. Twitpic was contacted by Twitter and asked to abandon the trademark application or Twitter would shut down its API access. Rather than fight the company, Everett decided to shut Twitpic down.

Twitter said that it would allow Twitpic to use the name, and only objected to the company's trademark application.

"We're sad to see Twitpic is shutting down," a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider at the time. "We encourage developers to build on top of the Twitter service, as Twitpic has done for years, and we made it clear that they could operate using the Twitpic name. Of course, we also have to protect our brand, and that includes trademarks tied to the brand."