Remote photo printing - kodakgallery and Yahoo

I got a coupon mailed to try digital photo printing at kodakgallery.com/cvs for pickup at CVS pharmacy. Don't ask me what I do with all these printed photos, I like to try them all out.

Ok, its a logical partnership, they've spent on marketing and reached me and I am a good potential customer. I've tried photo upload for priting at cvs.com many years back when it was buggy and liked that they've moved to Kodak Easy share.

I've been a regular user of Kodak Easy share from its early days.

But, guess what! http://www.kodakgallery.com/cvs routes to the regular home page of kodak gallery and it has no mention of CVS. Talk about falling thru the cracks!

Its sad that Kodak has the core competency in this business and has been a pioneer in several digital photo solutions from the same company in parallel, appearing to come from different groups inside the company and there are people like me ready to give another chance if they have a easy solution for me and we are here with a partnershuip that will make my life easy but all I get is marketing supported with no execution.

Yahoo Photos and Target partnership:

Oh! I noticed that Yahoo photos has a partnership with target for store pickup. Its a logical choice, since Target is walmart's competion who offer their own printing from their stores.

Since Walmart chewed corners of some of my pictures in their own intelligent sizing ( or is it some incompatability between their online site and store printers?), I am cautious to send a bunch of prints to target, though being a Yahoo photo fan, I'll try it out soon.

In fact, I saw this option on Yahoo photos, and thought, Hmm, I am not going to target anytime soon, so let me defer it for now. Then, guess what, I ended up in target and thought, oh, I wish I could just go online to Yahoo and upload the pictures now while I shop at target. Maybe target should setup an online kiosk to access Yahoo photos from their store as they'll make money in that process. Maybe Yahoo photos should demand that as part of their deal with target.


Mobile Photo Access:

Don't lets get started on all mobile upload options, its my dream, technically possible today, but, its a long way to go. My photos all sit online on an online photo site, say Yahoo photos. Yahoo can allow me an option to use my phone or PDA to select and purchase select pictures for pickup at target. Its not enough to allow uploading on my low resolution pics taken on my phone. That seems more driven by the carriers to charge me for bandwidth for the upload. It needs to be driven by Yahoo who owns the consumer and cares for their loyalty and direct dollars.

I keep going back to Yahoo as they are the market leader in digital photo space and have caught up well with Picasa (ok,ok, Yahoo did come up with the deskup photo upload option well before Picasa, but it wasn't as sticky as Picasa, ok) and everyone else in terms of all sticky features available in the market today with their AJAX version. So I am waiting for consumer centric mobile ecommerce...