Digital Film (CF Card) Developing/Printing

[hech54]

Question for ya'..
My mother wants prints developed from various digital photos....now...can I just drag and drop any picture to my totally empty CF Card and take it to one of those kiosks to have them printed?
Or do I need to keep the CF Card formatted as if it came straight from my Canon camera?
I've never had the need to do it this way but my mom is a bit old-fashioned and wants good quality prints....more quality than my little HP Deskjet could ever produce.

Thanks...
hech54

[HatchetMan]

they have to be .jpg
I have not had any probs with any of my memory cards, and I do just drag and drop
Sam's club does a nice job, 16 to 18 cents a 4x6 print.

[lordsmurf]

Most of those prints these days are just thermal. Better than ink, but not like silver halide paper (traditional photo paper). If you want traditional prints, there are mail-away places where you can send your prints (use a CD or something, not need to give away your CF cards) and they'll print them on halide.

[canadateck]

There is also Online stores,Just upload the Pictures , pick them up in 2 day or so.

[hech54]

OK...drag and dropping jpegs is fine with me...
So I should stay away from the "kiosks" and hand my CF Card to someone and I'll most likely get better quality paper?
OOps...
I really can't mail away...my family and I are on two different continents....I need to mail them from here.

[canadateck]

I'm sure anywhere you would Snail/mail these Pictures to would have a website or email. send it like that.

[jackal70058]

I think (but I not sure) that Walgreens can take you CF card and make real pictures out of it. Or you can use a CD. I think Target can do it too.

[lordsmurf]

I think (but I not sure) that Walgreens can take you CF card and make real pictures out of it. Or you can use a CD. I think Target can do it too.

All thermal.
Even the most pro shops are thermal (but better equipment).

Places like Target/Walgreens/etc poorly maintain equipment, and the settings are usually out of whack, or set to some "preset" that does not match the situation. Inferior quality images.

[canadateck]

I think (but I not sure) that Walgreens can take you CF card and make real pictures out of it. Or you can use a CD. I think Target can do it too.

All thermal.
Even the most pro shops are thermal (but better equipment).

Places like Target/Walgreens/etc poorly maintain equipment, and the settings are usually out of whack, or set to some "preset" that does not match the situation. Inferior quality images.

Thank You, I tell my wife this all the time. You get what you pay for..

[HatchetMan]

Places like Target/Walgreens/etc poorly maintain equipment, and the settings are usually out of whack, or set to some "preset" that does not match the situation. Inferior quality images.

Newer stores = better prints because of newer equipment, USUALLY, in most of my experiences anyway.
And if it's thermal, who cares, I thought they looked great! Pick 'em up right then and there. I usually go with Fuji because Kodak is more $$$.

[hech54]

I'm mainly looking for quality "better than my printer can do". My dad back home has been printing them for my mom and to her they look OK....I just think she is missing (or longing for) REAL pictures like they used to make....
I always went for matte finish myself...less fingerprints to be seen..

[yoda313]

Hello,

Just a warning..... I did that recently at a drug store and




The software won't let you read FOLDERS!

It's a pain in the ass to go through each page of 6 or so pictures to select the ones you want....

Try putting them in sequential order by renumbering them.

ALSO - you can upload them to some drugstores and pick up the prints later - MUCH EASIER

Kevin

[Roundabout]

Another problem I ran into at Costco kiosks - if the picture doesn't exactly match proper (or expected) ratios, it gets chopped off.

Example, my wife made a nice photo of friends with "Happy Holidays" across the bottom with PS, dropped the pic back onto the CF card. No problem so far. Went to Costco, and had it printed (had to wait an hour).

Upon looking at the finished product, we found that the entire greeting was cropped off. No matter what we did, it was impossible to get the greeting to fit within the area to be printed (there's no "shrink photo slightly" mode).

On top of that, there was no way to rotate pictures taken in Portrait mode (vertical) to Landscape (horizontal) aspect. All pictures taken in portrait mode were cropped and ruined. There was nothing on the kiosk unit to allow anything other than basic dark/light, hue, saturation, and crop settings. Nothing to rotate the picture. I guess they assume all photos will be taken in Landscape

Of course, had we known this, we could've rotated the pictures beforehand and put them back on the card.

In the end, we gave up and asked for a refund for the prints. At least there was no problem with that. They just handed us the money back and we left, a couple of hours wasted.

IMO the kiosks are fine, if you have only landscape photos and nothing else, it seems they all automatically crop a certain percentage off the photo no matter what. It even had a warning of sorts on the unit, showing how it would crop some of the photo out. Too bad for you if that happens to be an important part of the picture. Bah.