10 years ago, you would have to pay a photographer to develop the photos and go to a fucking post office, then your mom would wait a week to receive them.
10 years ago, which is still 2005, you had print kiosks in places like target where, you could plug in your digital camera or SD/Compact Flash cards and print them out, 10 years before that, you had a "guaranteed" flow of how to obtain your photos: take the snapshot, take in film to a photo lab for development, at which point you thought about how many copies you might want. you may have lost some in the lab, but the flow worked, and it was the same at every photo lab.
Regardless of the time period, he's annoyed how the "ease of use and simple flow" is not so easy, and doesn't seem to flow. Some of it may be not being familiar with the "way they want you to use their products" (poor UX in my opinion). But that's what kills me about today's app centered smartphone web, everything is a unique little microcosm that is slightly different than the others in a way that is obnoxious. Perhaps it is the difference between being a consumer of content and a producer. As a producer of content I would like to think I have control over how I can obtain and distribute it, but technically you end up acting as a consumer of the product that "allow you" to produce... end rant
Nope. you're wrong. 10 years ago you could do all of this from your fucking home, just like you can do it now. The only difference is - you did not have to deal with all that Javascript bs.
FYI: ten years ago, we had e-mail, Flickr, Smugmug, web galleries, halfway decent digital cameras.
Also, the thread starter was setting up a straw man, no one said that developing photos yourself was better. Just that the experience of many web applications is not so good.
(Personally, I use BTSync's and/or Dropbox's photo sync, so that it shows up as a file on my machines. Sharing works fine as well, especially since Dropbox has the family-friendly Carousel that pulls photos of regular Dropbox.)
I had a Fujifilm digital camera which saved photos to an xD card. I'd plug it into my computer's USB port, it registered as a mass-storage device, and I'd pull the photos. If I wanted to send them privately, I could email them. If I wanted to share them with the public, I'd throw them up on a web host and link them from my LiveJournal (I was actually hosting my own site at the time, through a server in my living room, but any of the gazillion free webhosts at the time would've worked).
There were other options, too. My cousin used Ophoto. I think Flickr was around then. Facebook Photos came out about 9 years ago, I think, so I wouldn't have long to wait.
If you had developed your photos 10 years ago using analogic methods, your negatives are still usable, and your positive (if they were not too exposed to the sun thus conserved normally) would still be there.
Whereas if you already had a digital camera, the raw are either lost because the media has decayed, you forgot backup, or worse to index your database.
Your positive have all turned yellow unless you spent 10 times more in ink and paper per photo.
In 10 years you probably will have migrated these photo to the cloud and you will both have to pay a recurring costs for life to keep your data (that will die with you), or the photo will die with the service.
In 20 years, you will be more likely to find the old documents made on papers by your ancestors than any of your digital productions to your grand kids. And if you still have them entropy will win. You will not be able to find the relevant piece of data.
Analogic photo is the only long term low cost solution for now.
My experience has been the exact opposite. Minimal effort in backing up the digital copies makes them easier to access than the film I have from the same period since it's slowly decaying in a box 1,000 miles away.
I also remember an astronomic "observatoire" buying lifetime guaranteed ISO9600 CD as a secondary backup of jpeg encoded pictures in the early 2000's (if you look at it all choices that were legits) that discovered 2 years after the primary backup failed (HD) that the secondary also failed.
Whereas microfilms are still less expensive then and now, and still guaranteed to be more durable with less operational costs.
Those who sacrifice a cheap reliability for the illusion of an expensive ease of use deserve neither one, nor the other.
100 years ago, the mother would have died from blood loss and septic shock and the baby from a diarrhea a few weeks later. Also, the baby's father would be in the trenches somewhere in the North of France and the baby's grandmother would have 3 years to live before the 1918 flu kills her.
10 years ago you could print the photos on an inkjet or color laser printer at home. But this was a costly proposition in both time and money. Ink and toner being more expensive by weight than...a whole bunch of luxury goods[1].
You would still have to visit the post office and she'd have to wait for delivery, so you're right about that.
Is the photo storage and sharing market ripe for a (re)disruption?
