DO YOUR DIGITALS ONLINE

Sometimes an obvious solution doesn't make itself known until it happens to you. That's exactly what happened to me recently and when it finally did, it was one of those smack yourself across the forehead kind of moments. You see, I already knew the answer and in fact I had recently talked about it when I had a guest from Walgreens on Computer America, my syndicated radio talk show. Yet for some reason, all the pieces just hadn't fallen into place. But then one day, I had to get around two hundred copies of our brand new family holiday photo printed out. Once we had those, we could then insert them into the special greeting holder card, put them in the specially made envelopes and get them to the local Post Office so that we could get our holiday greeting cards out in time. And then disaster struck.

Printing out 200 photos was certainly possible for my color printer to handle but at the time I didn't have enough ink and glossy card stock on hand. Besides, it seemed that it would just be a lot easier to burn the single photo to a CD and take it to the local drug store's photo center. I had done so many times in the past so why should this be any different now? So I just took the CD with me and not the camera with it's USB cable nor the flash memory chip inside that had the photo on it. I just took the CD. When I arrived at the store, I was relieved to see that once again, there was no line waiting at the photo center. Let me tell you that when it comes to frustration levels, watching someone who isn't technically savvy trying to wrestle with a photo developing kiosk is way up there on the scale.

But the coast was clear so I just moseyed on up to the kiosk and inserted my CD. To my disbelief, the kiosk threw up an error message saying that my CD was completely unreadable. I just stared at the screen in disbelief. This was the CD that I had just burned, verified and was completely readable on my computer back at home. I tried to explain this to the attendant there after I tried re-inserting the CD several times with the same results. She smiled and explained that the CD reader was having problems and there really wasn't anything she could do about it. The moment of clarity hit me when I realized that I would have to drive all the way back home to burn yet another CD and drive back again, not knowing if would work anyway. You see, Walgreens offers a web-based image downloading service.

Wphoto from Walgreens is their website service that lets you download any digital image on your computer to most any of their photo center locations across the United States. You can register in just a few minutes and then it's as easy as browsing over to the folder where your images reside on your computer and selecting the ones you want to have printed. The website lets you organize your images into dated albums. The contents are displayed as thumbnail images.

After you download what you want, you just select the images you want printed, select the sizes and the number of copies to be made. Other options let you make your own greeting cards, make Photo CDs and choose from a nice selection of photo gifts such as photo coffee mugs, calendars, posters and more.

But back to my holiday picture moment. I just uploaded the photo, selected the 6 by 4 size and ordered 200 copies. I then selected the same store location from the list of stores in my area and the date on which to pick them up. I called the store to confirm and was told my photos were there waiting for me. It was wonderful, it was a free service and the cost of the printed pictures were the same.

I guess my point here is that I already knew that this service was available but for some reason, I never used it. Instead, I did it the way I was used to doing it and that way was fraught with perils. So before you endeavor to do something that requires you to get in the car, stop and think for a moment and check to see if it's something you could do online. If it is, it's probably a lot easer and possibly even less expensive.

http://photo.walgreens.com

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