Each year I help my parents with their annual Christmas Letter. The letter actually becomes a family affair. Dad writes it, Mom edits it, Allison proofs it, Tara proofs it and I reformat, set it up and add photos. I’ve also been known to rewrite, design and print the letter also. In past years this has been a sort of frustrating affair. The deadline rockets up on us, printers jam, computers crash and tensions run high. That is until we discovered the Kodak Picture Kiosk.
We actually started using the Kodak Picture Kiosk last year. Before that time I would gather all of the photos that we would normally include on the printed letter. Including the photos on the printed letter was a hassle because the best way to do it would be on plain paper, but my parents always bought some sort of holiday type paper and so that mean I had to do some creative formatting. I’d try it in a word processor and it would never look right and so, inevitably, I’d create the whole thing in Photoshop and print it as a single file. It was early on in the process and we were learning.
Now my Dad writes the letter and we format it to fit the fancy paper but we include an inserted photo with the letter. I take the photos from the past year that we want to include and I make up a 4X6 photo and we bring it to the Kodak Picture Kiosk at our local CVS and place our order, an hour later we pic up the photos.
Why do I like this? I like this because I don’t have to run the printer through cartridges of ink over and over. I like this because I can make up the photo I want the way I want it and to the specific size needed, no messing with trial and error of formatting the letter with the images in a word processing program or in PhotoShop and getting frustrated by the limitations of either program. It has become so much easier to do this now.
This story however, does not relate to the title and it is a mere fraction of what the Kodak Picture Kiosk can actually do. Did you know that you don’t even need any media with you to create picture products at the Kiosk? You just need to be able to log into Facebook and can create collages, photobooks and more from images in your albums and also from your friend’s albums. Imagine your Senior Prom, Wedding, Family Christmas Party all being photographed by multiple people and then those photos gathered together and made into unique and special gifts.
A friend of mine asked me to scan some photos of her parents. She’s going to use the Kodak Picture Kisok to make some special gifts for her family with those photos. There are so many things that you can make with the Kodak Picture Kiosk. You can create Photo Books, Collages, Prints, Archive DVDs, Personal Greeting cards and PYNK Smart print system for some great photos that fit perfectly into collage style frames. I created this collage very quickly from photos of Andrew that I had on Facebook.
