The photo industry: a changing landscape

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Aside from rushing higher-resolution cameras, speedier printers, fancier software and all-purpose kiosks into the marketplace, they're employing all their marketing tricks to mold consumer habits and transform electronically stored images into prints of all varieties.

Their campaigns run from scaremongering about the perils of letting pictures languish on computers that might crash to behavior-reinforcing TV ads by Rochester-based Kodak in which new digital patrons shout out “Where are my pictures?”

In the United States, prints ordered from retailers and Web sites or made at home fell from a peak of 30.3 billion in 2000 to 27.4 billion in 2004 and could dip to 25.9 billion this year, according to Photo Marketing Association International, a trade group in Jackson, Mich.

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Propelled by price wars among retailers led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Inc. and online upstarts like Snapfish and Shutterfly.com, prints from digital cameras could hit 7.7 billion this year, up from 400 million in 2000, and outnumber prints from film cameras by 2007.

And while an estimated 100 billion images are snapped in America each year — of which about a quarter are turned into prints — that could skyrocket above 1 trillion as camera phones not only proliferate but rapidly improve in quality.

“You've got the mass market going digital now and they care about prints more than ever before,” said Raj Kapoor, co-founder of Snapfish, a 13-million-member online pioneer just snapped up by Hewlett-Packard Co., which dominates the ink jet photo-printer market.

Most digital prints are still made at home — 61 percent last year compared with 90 percent in 2000. But online photo services have been whittled down of late to a handful of big players (in the past week, UOL bought PhotoSite for $10 million and Ofoto was renamed Kodak EasyShare Gallery) and retailers look likely to re-emerge soon as the kings of printing — their digital orders tripled to 1.6 billion last year.

While electronic storage “is a great way” to share and save images, consumers need to be aware of the potential pitfalls, cautioned Walter Haug, a marketing manager at Fuji Photo Film Co.

“Hard drives can crash, people sometimes misplace their CDs, media cards can become vulnerable,” Haug said. “If you're relying strictly on digital methods, you may end up with a problem.”

In 2003, a computer virus wiped out all 350 photos of Eisenberg's three-week honeymoon in Africa and the Maldives. Luckily, the New York City woman had uploaded them onto Snapfish.

But misfortune struck again in January.

Snapfish issued dire warnings that Eisenberg's pictures would be deleted if she didn't fulfill her minimum obligation — order one 19-cent print a year. Instead of taking quick action, she spent weeks creating a honeymoon album. She was just about to order one when she went into labor.

By the time Eisenberg returned home, the photos were gone — she thought for good.

But a call to Snapfish in February turned up her treasured collection. Snapfish, it turns out, keeps deleted files for an extra month or so.

A grateful Eisenberg's advice to all: “Print early and often.”

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