Drug Store Digital Photo Services
While in Vegas last week we shot up a lot of camera memory. Rather than spend money on more memory cards we’d only need for 3 or 4 days I thought to use the kiosk computers found at most any drug store to dump the memory sticks to a CD.
By Tuesday evening I had 768mb of pictures and went to CVS out on Flamingo by I-93 and used their Kodak kiosk. I was assured that though the Kodak software created the usual slideshow stuff ( I chose the CVS style CD rather than the Kodak Picture CD) the original pictures were not modified, only copied to the discs which is exactly what I wanted. It took a little while, maybe 20-25 minutes, to go through the whole process but then it was 2 CD’s. I was even able to use the Kodak kiosk station to review the new CDs to ensure the images were all there before clearing my memory sticks. A well spent $4.
Wednesday afternoon we hit Red Rock Canyon and it didn’t take long in that environment to once again fill up the memory sticks. As we had more to see before the sun dropped we hit the Walgreen’s on Flaming rather than drive all the way over to the CVS by I-93. At the Walgreens photo counter they have their own version of a Kodak photo kiosk so I checked again that the originals are dumped onto the CD unaltered and was likewise assured they were. Unfortunately the Walgreens version of the machine took over twice as long which I attributed to an old burner. Once done I quickly checked the CDs in the kiosk again before clearing the memory sticks. Satisfied, I shelled out my $4 and off to the Bellagio to get pictures of the dancing waters…
Fast forward to Sunday. I dumped all 4 CDs and the partially full memory cards onto my computer and start checking and sorting. The first thing I notice is the numbering is all messed up and Wednesday’s pictures are on top instead of in the lower third. I noticed the same group of the pictures had a comment added to them “Created by AccuSoft Corp”! Now this won’t effect me because it is a simple thing to remove these comments (already done) but what about Suzy Homemaker with a digital camera who doesn’t know any better? What happens if a novice takes these images to someone else for prints, say Walmart, and that line looks too much like a copyright to the minimum wage clerk? They won’t get their pictures printed! They’d probably have to go back to Walgreens to get the prints.
But that’s only the start of the damage done to 420 images. All of the date and camera information was erased (the Exif info) which is what tells me what the aperture, exposure and program mode the camera was in for a picture so I can repeat (or not!) results in the future.
At this point the Walgreens kiosk
- renamed/numbered all the images
- reset the date/time information
- added a comment that could be misconstrued as a copyright
- destroyed all of the Exif information
But that is still not the worst of it.
The process resized the images from 4 mega pixel to 2 mega pixel.
I think I could have forgiven everything else.
Remember I specifically asked the clerk if the photos were dumped as-is onto the CD. Had the answer simply been NO I could have driven 5 miles down the road to the same CVS store and done them there.
It won’t make a bit of difference, witnessed by the complete lack of response, but I have written Walgreens and told them of my displeasure at their degrading my images. The only recourse that remains is to tell all of you do not use Walgreen’s digital photo processing to create archive CD!. Go to CVS or anywhere with a Kodak kiosk which did exactly as advertised, dumped the raw images to the CD.