The first thing you need to decide is whether you want to print your pics or download the files so that you can keep them. Well, my recommendation is absolutely, KEEP THE FILES!
The files saved by a digital camera to your memory card are the electronic equivalent of your negatives. If you print your pics and delete the files, you are essentially throwing your negatives in the trash, preventing you from ever reprinting them or sharing them with family or friends.
Keeping the files is, without a doubt, the best course of action for any digital photographer.
But how do you keep the files? Read on!
Beginning in January 2005, the Camera Centers at each of the Walt Disney World theme parks were equipped with devices to download digital pictures from a variety of popular memory card types and burn them onto a CD. The price for these downloads is $12.99 per CD, but there is a catch - each CD is limited to 120 image files, even if your camera makes files small enough to fit hundreds on a single CD. Why? Probably to increase the number of CDs sold.
As of December 2005, the camera shops in Magic Kingdom and the Disney/MGM Studios both have self-service download kiosks, as does the Kodak ImageWorks center in Epcot's Imagination Pavilion. These machines will also allow you to burn your pics to CD from your memory card for $12.99 per disk. Unfortunately, I have not actually tried one of these machines, so I don't know if they have the same 120-image limit that the full-service downloads do.
Media types accepted for downloads at these locations are:
As an aside, this new service comes about as WDW eliminates all film processing services in the parks. Send-out film processing is still available at the resorts, but the 1-hour services have been discontinued.
Bring Your Own Laptop! If you have a laptop PC, you can use it to download your digital pictures, freeing up space on your camera's storage media.
You can also upload your pictures to one of the many popular internet services and order prints. Some of these services will mail your prints to your at home, while a few will have your prints produced for you at one of their local stores and made available for pickup. Many of these services will also allow you to store your photos on their servers at no charge and share links with family or friends; the object of this, of course, is to encourage Aunt Millie and Uncle Tito in Des Moines to buy prints of your family pics, but you can turn these s
Here is a list of some of the more popular online digital printing services (in alphabetical order):
If your PC has a CD or DVD recorder drive, be sure to bring several blank disks with you, and burn your pictures to a disk once in a while to act as a backup until you get home. Using a laptop, or other photo storage device like an Iomega PhotoShow, allows you to get the pictures off your CompactFlash, SmartMedia, or Memory Stick cards, freeing up that space for more new pictures. You can then simply wait till you get home to print out whatever photos you choose.Bring Your Own Portable Storage! There are several such devices on the market these days, which have memory card readers built into a single unit along with a hard disk or CD-burner that will store your photos safely until you get home. Most will also hook up to a TV using RCA cables so you can review your pics, and some even have built-in LCD screens to view your pics. These devices are $250-$500, a fair amount of money, but are much smaller and lighter than a laptop computer, and they will save you the cost of buying a slew of memory cards for your digital camera.
Here are just a few off the devices I have seen online. DISCLAIMER: I have not used any of these devices and cannot recommend one!
CD-burners
Alera Digital Photo Copy Cruiser Plus
CTX USB 2.0 Standalone 32x24x40 CDRW w/8-in-1 Card Reader
Delkin Devices Burnaway
Hard disks
Creative-Labs Zen Vision W 30GB Personal Video and MP3 Player
Epson P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer, 40GB Stand-Alone Data Storage Unit and Photo Viewer
If you have a rental car, you can easily go off Disney property, which opens up a host of possibilities for downloading and printing your digital pictures.
My preference would be to use one of the local Walgreens stores. Each of the Walgreens in the WDW vicinity has a 24-hr photo lab, complete with digital downloading and printing services (note that not all services are available 24 hours a day, but the lab is staffed by at least one person around the clock). Walgreens will download your digital pics from all of the same flash memory cards as the Disney locations, and will also accept images already on CD for printing.
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Last Revision: 2006-10-11
