30 Minute Photos Etc and ScanMyPhotos.com in Irvine, CA have 8 Kodak Photo Kiosks installed with the new software.
Kodak’s in-store kiosks now have access to Facebook and you can quickly view and create photo gifts, collages and Kodak-quality pictures from the Facebook photos.
The kiosks now allow customers, particularly their primary target women, to directly access the photos on their Facebook pages or their Kodak Gallery or Picasa accounts.
About 3.5 billion photos are uploaded every month by Facebook’s 400 million users worldwide,
By giving access to Facebook through the kiosks, a customer can make a print even if he forgot his USB drive or CD.
Icons for the three sites pop up on the screen as one of the print options. When pressed, the customer is asked to sign into his Facebook page. The kiosk then finds and displays the photos stored on the site. It does not bring up the primary Facebook site, so all of the person’s private information is not revealed.
The software offers two viewing options, by date or album, so the user can quickly drill down to the photos needed. Since Facebook does not store the photos in their original resolution, the software warns the customer if the photo chosen is printable,
Facebook has recently increased the size of the photos to 720 pixels wide, up from about 600, so more photos will be available for printing. This will not only make more photos print ready, but it enables the photos to be used in a variety of other products, such as collages, slideshows and printed albums.
Another editing trick is called Pet Eye Retouch. Kodak’s focus groups found people were anxious to fix the red eye that forms when photos are taken of their pets. For several technical reasons, normal red-eye reduction software cannot work on an animal, so Kodak allows the user to go in and manually eliminated the problem.
