That is, I fake digital pictures, and I fake being part of the digital revolution. I use You've Got Pictures on AOL. It's a convenient, although sometimes expensive, service. Now I can fake it a new (and cheap) way: with ofoto.com.  Ofoto.com is a new service that develops your pictures for FREE! (Remember that's my favorite word, free.) You snap away and then send your film to the ofoto.com offices somewhere in California. When you sign up for ofoto.com, they send you a little welcome kit with instructions and prepaid (I told you this was free, right?) envelopes to send your film in. The nice folks at ofoto.com develop the pictures for you and upload them to their web site. When the processing is complete, they send you an email with the great news that you can view your pictures; you just click into you private area on their site and pick up your pictures. How cool is that?
Well, like everything on the internet these days, it gets even better. After you have viewed your pictures, you can order prints of the ones you like, and of course not pay for the prints of the pictures your don't like. This is very helpful to me because I usually end up with two or three pictures that are too dark or too light. Then, of course, there are the couple of pictures at the end of the roll where we take random pictures of the animals (we have four: two dogs and two cats) usually in unflattering positions. While these pictures may be cute on the web, the usually end up in the shoe box of rejected pictures. Now, thanks, to ofoto.com they can just sit on a web site and not clutter up our house. There are other neat features at ofoto.com. You can set up a photo album and share the pictures with family and friends. They also have a guestbook feature where folks can write comments and share the stories behind the pictures. If you have a digital camera, you can upload pictures to the ofoto.com site and order prints of those as well. All in all, it's a great service. Prints start at $0.49 for a 4"x6" photo. I think this is pretty reasonable. Probably a little more expensive than the local drugstore when you factor in shipping, but then again you are not paying for the prints you don't want and you are saving a lot of time! In a promotional special, you get 70 free prints when you sign up and can earn up to 30 more if you get friends and family to sign up.  I've found two other sites that offer comparable services. Shutterfly.com offers the same features as ofoto.com; I had a little difficulty figuring out how to sign up, but sometimes I am just dim when it comes to navigating sites. I like the big old JOIN HERE buttons and really simple instructions throughout the process. Shutterfly.com has a bonus of 100 free prints when you join from now through June 30, 2000.
 The other new service, Snapfish.com, will always develop your film for free AND send the prints to you. It sounds great but there are two caveats. First, you have to pay $1.69 per roll for shipping and handling of the prints that they mail to you. While that seems pretty reasonable to me, the second caveat got me: if you don't view your photos online, you pay a development fee of $3.99. By the time you hit $5.68 you are reaching the price of developing at the local drugstore. I cruised around snapfish.com but didn't join because of the caveats and because they wanted a credit card to bill shipping and handling of future film developing. I just wasn't ready to give up my credit card on my first visit.
So that's my story on web based film development. I hope you found it helpful, and I hope that my confession of faking will just stay between us. ;-)
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*Do you have great ideas for Word to the Wired? Feel free to email them to me at Julie@technodyke.com. You can also reach me on ICQ: 45820273. |
