BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : AUGUST 28, 2000 ISSUE
BUSINESSWEEK LIFESTYLE To Develop Your Vacation Pictures, Just Click Now photo-sharing Web sites offer processing, too--often for free Every year, my family rents a cabin or condo in a prime vacation spot so that we can all get together for a week in the summer. And every year, the same post-vacation snapshot madness sets in. Once back home, my three brothers and I all get our film developed and mail the second sets of prints from brother to brother and finally to my mother, round-robin style, so that everyone can put their mark on the back of the ones they want copied. If we're lucky, we've gotten everything shipped, selected, sorted, reprinted, and re-mailed by Christmas. Then, of course, everyone takes a lot more pictures at Christmas. This time around, I decided to take the high-tech approach to sharing my snaps. Within the past year, dozens of companies have set up photo-sharing Web sites. Originally, they were designed to let you post digital photos, either snapped with a digital camera or scanned into your computer with a digital scanner. The idea is that you organize your best ones into albums and invite friends and family to look at them on the Internet. If anyone wants hard copies, they click on their favorites, enter a credit card number, and get professional-quality prints in the mail. PHOTO PASTRY. Now, for the digitally-deprived shutterbugs among us, many Internet startups have started adding conventional film-processing services as well. I tried out four of the best-known ones: Club Photo, ememories, Ofoto, and Snapfish. They all work pretty much the same way. You mail them your film, they develop it, scan it, and post it online. They e-mail instructions on how to find your pictures. Best of all, they do all this for free, or almost free. All but Club Photo, which sells you the mailer for $1, pay the postage to get your film. Only Snapfish, for a $1.69 shipping fee, sends you a set of prints from your negatives. The companies hope to make money by selling you and your friends prints, picture frames, and all manner of merchandise decorated with photos, from coffee mugs to cookies. At the end of my vacation, I dropped all of my film--one roll per mailer--at the post office in Estes Park, Colo. To compare the results with traditional photofinishers, which have also gotten into the online photo-sharing business, I mailed off another roll to PhotoWorks.com, the new name of longtime mail-order processor Seattle FilmWorks. That cost me $11 for prints by mail plus photos online. Back home, I dropped off my final roll for one-day processing at a Rite Aid drugstore in Burbank, Calif. Retail photofinishers now offer the upload option, most of them through Kodak's PhotoNet service, also available as ''You've Got Pictures'' for America Online members. SNEAKY CHARGES. When I logged on the next day, AOL's familiar voice chirruped ''you've got pictures!'' But what price instant gratification? Rite Aid exacts an extra $6.99 for simply scanning and uploading my photos, something all of the other companies do for free. And that's just the beginning. While the other companies let you store your albums on their sites for free, AOL charges $1.49 a month for each 50 pictures beyond the first 50. Want to download a high-resolution image to fiddle with at home--to crop out your brother's former girlfriend, say? That'll be another dollar, please. If you're the type who likes to watch your snapshots drop out of the end of the one-hour photo machine, the new free services aren't for you. The fastest, Club Photo, made my pictures accessible online in four days, as promptly as for-pay PhotoWorks. But it took Ofoto and ememories more like a week, and I all but gave up on the two most widely publicized startups, Snapfish and Shutterfly. Shutterfly didn't get its film-developing business started until after I left for vacation, so I ordered mailers, shot a roll, and sent it in after I got back. So far--11 days and counting--I don't know whether the company has even received my film. Of all the sites, Snapfish was my least favorite. Though it alone offers a free set of prints with each roll developed (for a $1.69 shipping fee), it took two frustrating weeks to get my photos online. By then, the prints had already arrived in the mail. And Snapfish is cheeky in the way only an Internet startup can be. You have to give a credit card number to get free mailers. You're billed an extra $3.99 if you don't get to its Web site to view your pictures within 30 days. And you have to answer a short marketing questionnaire before it will even let you look at your snapshots. When it comes time to start organizing and retouching your online photos, the differences between the sites became clearer. Here, Club Photo is the best of the bunch. But ememories comes close, largely because you could produce the best-looking albums on its site. Ememories lets you choose from a generous array of backgrounds, and each page can be customized with its own title, caption, and enough descriptive text to write a book if you want. You can also add live links to other Web pages. Club Photo has the best of a primitive lot of photo-editing tools. It's the only site that lets you lighten or darken images online, a feature that can dramatically affect the look of your pictures. Club Photo and ememories also are the only free sites that allow you to download high-resolution pictures so you can improve them by cropping, fiddling with colors, and adjusting the contrast using desktop photo-editing software, something that undoubtedly will be built into the sites in the future. Club Photo also has a nifty feature that lets you download your favorites to your Palm. And don't forget those photo-decorated cookies, at $26 a dozen. In the end, I ordered prints from every site, going so far as to post a couple of the same pictures on each so that I could compare print quality. The prints are expensive, about 50 cents each for the 4-inch-by-6-inch size, compared with about 30 cents for drugstore reprints, although ememories discounts to that price when you order 24 or more. The Club Photo shipment once again arrived first, in four days. Everyone else took a week or more. But by then I wasn't very interested in the prints, or even anxious about the wait it takes to get them. I already had the best of them edited into albums and had e-mailed invitations to my friends and family to view them. I was more interested in their plaudits (''what a great idea,'' ''you're a genius''), and in what new twists the online sharing sites will come up with next. As I see it, online photo sharing can only get better. And in time for Christmas, I hope. By LARRY ARMSTRONG _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS To Develop Your Vacation Pictures, Just Click TABLE: Sizing Up the Photofinishing Sites INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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