Overnight photos

Memo to self: Add to list of amazing things-- uploading, downloading, and overnight processing of digital photos.

It hasn't been too many years since we dropped off film at Costco after carefully filling out the processing envelope. We then waited a week or so and returned to that same Costco where we hunted through rows and rows of processed envelops. We would use stylized lettering on the envelopes or paint the corner with fluorescent highlighter in order to see our envelopes easier and quicker. Still it could take 15 minutes and more to find our films.

For an extra charge you could leave your photos at the nearby 1-hour processing and have your photos worked on while you are busy shopping in the store. When you absolutely had to have the pictures on a role you used the 1-hour because it didn't leave the premises.

Costco didn't lose a lot of films but they did lose one of ours. Almost by chance we found Costco's "lost film center" while exploring in the San Diego area. And even more amazing, we found the pictures in the lost roll.

Fast forward to today. Saturday evening I took 97 pictures of our ward's Valentine Dinner-Dance. While others were still cleaning up I came home to extract the portrait pictures we had taken of almost everyone. From these 31 pictures I cropped and did minor editing to effect a closer picture. I then uploaded the 62 pictures and instructed Walgren's which store I wanted to pick up the finished pictures.

At 8:00 a.m. the following day, I received an email saying the pictures were ready to pickup. I dropped in shortly after 10:30 to pick up and pay for 62 pictures (4 x 6 glossy) for about $8, The original images never left our house once they got there. If the store had lost the order, we could have easily recreated it. There was no long line or cramped bins stuffed with our pictures and everyone else's. And I got the 2 pictures I wanted from each couple for 13 cents a pop. And if I wanted to, I could share that album with a finite number of people so they could print their own pictures. What progress!