Costco photo services

It's possible that I'm the last clod in the US to learn of the Costco photo printing services, but on the off chance that I'm not, I'll pass this along. If you have a local Costco and a digital camera, this could come in handy. At this point, I'm a satisfied customer.

Since moving to a digital camera a few years ago I've been doing a pretty good impression of an ostridge when it comes to prints. I found the idea of local digital images and web based based pages a better way of sharing. Not everyone feels that way of course. People like my wife and other members of the family want pictures they could stick in wallets or frames. Sometimes even I wanted to blow up something I'd managed to capture. But I kept my head pretty firmly embedded in the sand.

A recent request by my aunts for a specific picture finally spurred me into some sort of action. But I wanted an 8x10, which was a bit tricky. I was still searching for something that worked for me when I talked to Stu on New Years Eve (we had our usual two hour conversation that happened to include a bit about photo printing services). His first recommendation was Costco. I had to explain that I haven't been in there in years and didn't even know they had photo processing.

Silly me, I should have known about this a while ago. C'est la vie. In the last few days I've obtained an updated membership card (my hair is no longer anywhere near my shoulders), setup a photo account, done a number of web uploads, ordered a few different prints of varying types and sizes and brought them home so we could check them out.

The web upload plug-in for Safari is much better than I expected and works quite well. My only disappointment was the lack of support for TIFF files; I had to convert one image I'd done some tweaking on to JPEG in order to upload. I haven't tested in FireFox yet, something to get around to I suppose.

With everything turning out so well (I'd printed a mixture of 4x6's, 5x7's and 8x10's in my first couple trips), I figured I'd take a shot and see what a 12x18 on lustre paper looked like. I wound up trying this picture of the tree out front (taken in the odd lighting provided by the September fires) and it looks good enough to mount. Cost? $2.99 plus tax and I picked it up this afternoon after submitting last night.

I still need to check out Mpix, also recommended by Stu for more professional level imaging services (canvas prints? sounds interesting) but I'm quite happy with the quality and efficient delivery offered by Costco.