The following I guess could be thought of as what's known as a cautionary tale, one that you might like to read to get an idea of the ethereal nature of this medium, especially for items you might treasure like family photos. This was written in late 1999 and while admittedly things were in their "infancy" at that point, in terms of photo sharing the models and concepts remain the same. The game here is to find how many of these photo services are still around and guess what might have happened to all the images stored on them. It also shows just how naive the writer (me) was about all that at the time.
Online Finishing: The Growth of a New Industry
With the growth of digital camera sales and especially the increase in film images being digitized, the photofinishing industry is gearing up for a new way to receive and print your images. The idea of photofinishing on line has become a reality. Everywhere you turn—from radio to TV to newspaper ads—there are photo related sites touting the ability to hold onto the family album, send and share pictures between distant relative and friends and offer prints from uploaded or pre-loaded images that come from virtually every source. While the digital minilab and the walk-up kiosk may still handle the walk-in trade of the future, it’s becoming clear that many people think that the Internet will be a major venue for photofinishing services as well.
According to Media Metrix, the use of home PC photography programs has grown from 3.8 million users in 1997 to over 16.7 million users in late 1999. That means that just about 1 in 5 of every home PC is using digital photography in some fashion or other. While that growth is impressive, so is the future potential.
A host of innovative companies have fueled the rapid development of online digital services. Many of these Internet sharing sites are brand spanking new. In a touch of graceful irony one such firm, established in 1998, claims to have a “well-established track record.” But that’s what’s old in this new age.
If you’d like to check out what these sites are like you might try two of the most successful, Shutterfly.com and ActiveShare.com. In fact the two sites are linked in a partnership that brings the best of both worlds—the photofinishing expertise of Shutterfly and the muscle of ActiveShare’s parent, Adobe software—to the table.
Shutterfly.com is a sharing site, printing site and photo enhancement site all in one. Just what is a sharing site? It’s a place where you can either upload your images from your digital camera or those film images you have had digitized via Picture CD and share them with family and friends. You are assigned an album space, actually memory on a server, that you fill up with images. Your album has an address that is accessed only through a password you choose and that you share with those you want to see the images.
Once you have an album account established you can order and send prints, enhance the photos with borders, cropping and other special effects and then have them printed and add to or create new albums as you go.
So let’s say you take some photos on vacation and want to show them off to your family and friends in different parts of the country. Or you’ve met new friends on your travels and want to send them images you took of the times you spent together. All you need is their e-mail and your album password.
You use Shutterfly's Smart Download software to get your digital images from your camera or hard drive and send them over the line. Or if you’ve shot film you can send them the roll and..guess what? You get free film processing and posting of your images online. It seems like a win/win situation all the way down the line. You get free film processing, free sharing and free access to your album while Shutterfly gets the chance to sell you prints for yourself and your family and friends.
Adobe’s ActiveShare site works with Shutterfly. If you enter their site at ActiveShare.com you can also get prints through Shutterfly, plus you can create a sharing circle of friends. The service is called e.Circles and it’s a way to create an instant community of photo sharers. What you do is identify friends as interested parties in certain types of your photos. Some might like to see your vacation shots while others are for closer family and friends. You can limit pictures of the kids to grandparents and siblings while sharing your hobby with another group of eCircle folks. It’s like a broadcast service built into a sharing site.
You can also use ActiveShare.com’s AmazingMail.com for creating postcards using any of your images. You upload images and order the postcard, and the company will create and mail them for you.
Of course the best way to get the most from the site is via Adobe’s PhotoDeluxe software, which comes with ActiveShare as part of the package. That way you can make all sorts of changes and do lots of creative work on your images and then send them or order prints.
Another active e-finishing business is PhotoPoint, which claims to be the world’s largest photo sharing website. Recently, PhotoPoint signed an agreement with Kodak making Print@Kodak available to PhotoPoint folks. The company is also very promotion minded, recently awarding a photographer a million bucks for winning a contest. The company also announced that it recently received their 10 millionth image.
Zing and Sony
At Zing they claim to be the most trafficked online photo community. The site, zing.com, provides free photo storage, album and sharing services, content and mail order photo printing. The company claims that their open architecture allows them to provide a customized, co-branded photo center that can be integrated easily with partner website activities.
Recently, Zing announced a partnership with Sony to help strengthen Sony’s online digital imaging presence, dubbed ImageStation. The company also is offering PictureIQ, an online photo editing and manipulation application. The company also works with HP and their new “scan to web” technology. This takes images scanned on HP scanners right into a Zing sharing site.
Talking Pictures
At dotPhoto they claim to be the first web site that integrates photo sharing with voice and sound capability plus digital finishing. The company offers, for $4.99, a first time membership that includes printing of 36 uploaded images, free shipping and a free personal computer microphone, required for the voice-to-picture technology.
The Kodak/AOL partnership has been getting some press, so the logical next step was for Yahoo! to get involved. They have done so with Yahoo! Photos, with printing and services provided by Shutterfly. As an intro, the company is offering first time users 15 free prints. At Yahoo! Photo you can create albums, add photos, share and send and order prints. There’s also one click access to club and auction sites.
So photofinishing has become e-photofinishing and now labs are web-based application service providers for both consumers and other imaging partners. The jargon is amazing, but so are the ideas and changes ahead. Has e-finishing taken the world by storm? Not yet. In fact, regular film processing increased over 10% in the last year. But digital camera users now have a photofinishing service that is almost as convenient as bringing the film down to the corner store. But the only highway they have to drive on to get there is the Internet.
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