October 26, 2005

Printing, at last!

Posted in General at 10:49 pm by Dan Coulter

Ok, so right after I say that I probably won’t post unless something big happens at Flickr, they announce photo printing. I’ve been wanting this so badly that I was thinking about ways to make an easy link for people to be able to buy prints of my photos from an online photo service (like Shutterfly).

Here’s the skinny… first, you have to go set your printing preferences. There are all sorts of levels on this, so you can only allow yourself to print your photos or you can allow everyone to be able to print them (and everywhere inbetween). Once you’ve done this, a button appears above the image to order prints. It looks like you can’t specify this preference on just one photo or a group of photos, which would be nice (all of the photos from a party or roadtrip). Your shopping cart is kept right within the Flickr site so you can browse around and pick which photos you want. You get ten free prints, so get a couple to test the photo quality (I’m going to do this soon myself). You can have them ship the photos to you or you can pick them up at your local Target store in as little as four hours (for an extra nickle per picture, but no shipping fees).

As if that’s not enough, you’ll see that they’re rolling out a “pilot program” of partner programs that will allow you to “do more” with your photos. The first one is a CD/DVD printing service from englaze. For $10 you can get a CD with an archive (of up to 50) of your Flickr photos. Each 100 photos after the first 50 costs another $4 (let’s see, if your images were 1MB per image, it’d cost you $38 to fill up a CD with 700 images). To get a larger capacity DVD costs $35 for the first 1000 and $10 for every 1500 after that (that’s a whopping $65 for a full disc of 4700 images at 1MB per file). Needless to say, I am less than impressed with this pricing. Hell, for $65, I’d ship you a DVD with your photos on it. I’d even throw in an invoice explaining that approximately $2 of the price went into materials and shipping, $15 for labor, and the other $48 was pure markup.

The other service that Englaze is providing is a DVD with a slideshow of your Flickr photos. This one costs $20 for 50 photos and $5 for every additional 100 photos. Their site has a preview of what the slideshow will look like. It looks to me like the effects range from zooming out to panning to…well…zooming out and panning at the same time. Not that I’m asking for star wipes or anything. I just can’t imagine watching hundreds of photos do the same inane zoom for very long. The site also gives you a bunch of HIGH-larious MIDI files (be sure to check out “Reflection 1″, those MIDI pan pipes are making Zamfir cry) that you can choose from to lay over your zooming pictures. This will ensure to drive anyone mad who dares to view your slideshow DVD. Worth 20 bucks? I’d say so.

The third feature is actually kinda cool. You can order a sheet of stamps with one of your photos printed on them. That’s right, real US Postal stamps. I assume that a few of you out in cyber-land still use the US Postal Service. Why not send your letters in style with one of your sweet photographs of your cat? The stamps are large (1 1/2 inches by 2 inches) and you can adjust and crop your photos to suit your whims. The only drawback to this is that you’re going to pay an extra $10 for every $7 of postage. It’s a pretty cool idea though and I’m sure there’s a decent segment of the Flickr crowd who will get these stamps printed. I just wish the stamps said something about Flickr on them. That’d be a cool way to evangelize.

So in conclusion: thumbs up on the photo printing and the stamps, but the whole CD thing is overpriced and pretty useless, if you ask me. Not a great thing to start your “pilot program” with.

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