“I Thought SnapFish Blew It...”

SnapFish offered to develop my first roll of film for free (or give me 10 prints from a digital camera) if I'd sign up with their service, which is also free. It all went smoothly enough: signup was very easy, and the postage-paid envelope for sending in my roll of film arrived in a few days, as they promised. They even included return-address labels, and a label for each roll of film.

It only took about five minutes to have the film ready to go back out in the mail.

The "gimmick" that SnapFish's business is built on is that they scan all the photos they develop and put them in albums for you automatically. Then if you want more or bigger prints, you can order them directly from the web site. You can also show your albums to anybody you want to.

Five days after sending them film, they sent me an email to say that it was developed. The prints were in the mail, and they included the URL for the album on their web site.

That's all great, it worked just as they promised, but for one little detail: the prints are all upside down! Duh! Obviously they've automated this whole process, which I expected, but what good is a digital album full of wrong-side-up photographs?

They have a handy online tool for fixing this. I didn't find it the first time I looked, and they never responded to my email, but this morning I found the too and it worked well enough.

Now I'm just hoping the prints look good. They want $0.29 each to download the hi-res digital files, which reminds me why I like my digital camera so much.