Renowned Photography Site DPReview Gets Last-Minute Save

Months after being slated for permanent shutdown and erasure, the widely-read photography site DPReview is saved.

According to a June 20^th announcement by Scott Everett, general manager of the website, “We’re thrilled to share the news that Gear Patrol has acquired DPReview. Gear Patrol is a natural home for the next phase of DPReview’s journey, and I’m excited to see what we can accomplish together,”

Almost three months ago, Amazon decided to permanently kill off the enormously popular photography site DPReview, which it had owned since 2007.

Aside from the abruptly announced shutdown itself, what irritated many photography fans was the lack of plans by Amazon to bother archiving the site’s existing content for future readers.

To many, this was all the more galling considering that Amazon itself is in the digital data storage business through its Amazon Web Services branch and could have easily archived DPReview’s body of content for posterity.

Originally, following the shutdown announcement on March 10^th, 2023, DPReview was to be closed down as of April 10^th.

In the wake of this, several third-party online efforts were made to archive the site’s existing content for future readers.

These included one by The Archive Team and another by the Internet Archive. The latter of these already had a long-running trove of DPReview content archived for public viewing.

On April 7^th, only three days before its planned shutdown, DPReview’s general manager, Scott Everett, posted an update in which he stated that it content would be officially archived for future reading.

Since these archiving efforts by the owners themselves were expected to take a while, Everett also added that the site would in fact continue adding new content for the time being.

This infusion of new life let Digital Photography Review stay alive and active for weeks longer until suddenly, weeks later, the highly visible closure announcement on the site’s homepage disappeared.

The site also visibly kept up with a rigorous content publishing schedule even though weeks had passed since it was slated for destruction.

There was even a further update by Everett on May 11^th in which he explained that the site would keep adding new long-form content about camera technology amidst a sprinkling of general short posts.

This is how things continued until today when it was announced that Gear Patrol had bought the site from Amazon and would be reviving it completely.

Now while this is ostensibly good news and at least means that DPReview’s existing content will stay active, we don’t yet know how the future quality of content by the site will shape out. For that, we’ll have to wait and see.

For its part, Everett, writing on behalf of his new masters, states that:

“The site will continue to operate as it was before, with all editorial coverage and site features remaining the same, and all historical content accessible. That being said, we are excited to begin a new chapter working within and alongside an editorial company like Gear Patrol and expect to continue evolving DPReview based on customer feedback and the rapidly changing state of the publishing industry,”

He also reaffirms that:

“I want to reassure you that we remain firmly committed to what makes DPReview great: the best camera reviews in the business, industry-leading photography news and features, and one of the most active photography communities anywhere on the internet. This is just the beginning of a new chapter for DPReview and we don’t have all the answers yet, but I’m sharing what we know below and will continue to share information about this change as we get more acquainted with our partners at Gear Patrol.”

We certainly hope that the site stays as good and in-depth as it has famously been for years. Many photographers of all kinds learned to trust its reviews and other articles for serious photography and gear advice.

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