Online Digital Photographic Processing

Agfa, Fuji and Kodak have become household names providing branded products to billions of consumers throughout the past century, but photo processing from conventional film rolls is down about 20% this year. The photo processing industry employs tens of thousand of people in the USA, Japan and Europe and blue chips like Kodak have been rapidly disinvesting from their central labs into other fields like medical imaging, shedding thousands of jobs in their photo labs. In Europe, some of the larger central photo processing companies keep their revenues stable in two ways: Catering for digital photography through POS and online channels, which is up by about 80% over last year (digital accounts for over 20% of all photo development) and with new products like photo calendar printing , photobooks (a new printed photo album), photo mugs, shirts, and other photo gift ideas. Demand for calendars from digital photos was up 1300% in Q4 2005 over the previous year.

The trend towards photo gifts increases the shift in seasonality for the industry. The main season for photo processing used to be the end of the summer school holidays, when people wanted to finally reveal what was on their film roll. With digital photography people have already seen the images several times before processing them and can wait to pick the ones to print, placing their orders between September and December together with a photo book for their partner and a photo calendar or other photo gift for granny. Unlike off the shelf gifts, individual gifts from own photos can only be processed on demand. Photo labs are increasingly seeing the need to install capacity largely underused for nine month of the year and to work 24/7 on the labour intensive photo gifts during the run up to Christmas. With European labour laws making this costly and difficult Europe’s largest independent central lab has put its eyes on Ukrainian. The next stage of the shift in photo printing might see personalized gifts from digital photos being produced in countries with low labour costs and the flexibility to employ a temporary work force during the Christmas season. Goods would need to be shipped back rapidly to where the first world digital consumer demands them.

But it could also happen that people start making more of the photo gifts at home again. For this gift shopping season 1-More is releasing a new version of its popular PhotoCalendar software for PC. Such applications make it easy to create complete, personalized, high quality photo calendar using the summer holiday pics and takes only minutes. Interested users might want to create an art calendar edited with their own digital pictures. PhotoCalendar can also be used to design and print anything from a single page to a thirteen months calendar. There is no better, individual and creative gift for beloved ones.

Many easy-to-use features make the photo calendar output original pieces of art. Applications like 1-More PhotoCalendar help the creative process with many pre-made layouts and the option to add clipart in frames. The registered version allows selecting different typefaces and colors for all parts of the calendar. The order of the objects can be freely defined and image titles and descriptions added. New in this latest release are special filters for professional effects.

1-More PhotoCalendar software can scale calendars to the format supported by the printer, lowering the hurdles to home printing.

Calendars edited in 1-More PhotoCalendar can start on any date of the year, making it a great tool to create gift calendars all year round. The very romantic let the calendar start or end on a special day of the month (this may extend the calendar to thirteen pages; e.g. from Sept. 20th, 2006 to Sept. 19th, 2007), making it the utmost personal present.

The great think about processing or printing photos is that all those digital treasures languishing on hard drives could finally see the light of day with the easy to use PhotoCalendar software. Getting nicely laid out, perfectly printed photo calendars to decorate a wall or desk is easy and set to become the latest must-have application for the creative computer user. Once the user has downloaded the PhotoCalendar applet from the 1-more.com website and installed it, the software guides the user through the calendar creation process. Digital images on a hard drive, CD, or camera are easily accessed. The layout, photo editing and framing tools are self explanatory with clearly laid out icons. A limited version of the application described can be downloaded and used free of charge, the full application for use with own photos costs only $19.- as a download from http://www.1-more-photocalendar.com, where the full version can be unlocked immediately to ensure that gift calendars can be edited and printed in time. Managing Director Michael Bartos and ads: “1-more.com specializes in easy to use creative photographic software. The new release of PhotoCalendar is set to resolve many people’s headaches over presents for friends and family.”

The judgment is open whether central photo labs can compete against domestic craft when it comes to getting personal presents ready for the season. For certain, today’s consumer has more choice than ever.

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