Posted by Joe Johnson at 12/20/2000 2:20 PM EST
Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.
Hi all,
I have an idea that involves Snapfish.com and could make our lives in the online FIRST community a lot easier (and perhaps more fun). Before say any more, I want to make clear that I have no financial ties to the success of Snapfish. I use them and I like them but that is the extent of it.
Basically, Snapfish develops film for the dirt low price of $1.69 per roll. That includes a set of prints on Kodak paper, the negatives and postage (both TO and FROM Snapfish). It is practically free in my book. It has been pretty fast as well. In most cases it is faster for me to mail stuff off to snapfish than it is for me to find time to remember to drop the film off and then pick it up.
There are two features of snapfish that may really help the online community if FIRST teams use them. ‘Albums’ can be shared for free with other teams. Typically an album is a roll of film, but the photos can be reorganized to suit your needs – for instance a team may be reluctant to share robot build pictured prior to the ship date, but happy to share team photos or other photos on the same roll. They can easily be sorted into public and not public albums. Anyway, these shared albums are online for everyone to see in digital format (jpeg) for teams to use as they like. AND (this is the second feature that I think will be useful) anyone you share the album with (including the owner of the album of course) can order quality reprints directly from Snapfish. The quality of the reprint is better than the digital photo shared online – they claim that it is as good as a Kodak 35mm negative reprint. In fact, Kodak is the actually company that produces the reprint – Snapfish just send along the high resolution digital file.
Here is what I am thinking. Does EVERY team need to get a shot of the field at the kickoff? Does EVERY team need a shot of Dean & Woodie on the field or a picture of the field house? How about scouting photos? It is a natural way to share the load.
So…
If Chief Delphi made Snapfish its official photo developer and agreed to share photos would others join us?
Any thoughts?
Joe J.