Use Disney's PhotoPass or Take Your Own Darn Pictures

My mom still takes pictures with a regular 35mm camera. In fact, on a joint vacation with my folks two years back, my mom insisted on taking duplicate shots of everything I captured with my digital camera because she knew (all too well) that I would never print out any pictures post our vacation.

And we're talking about Disney World here (in case the series of articles has not given it away yet, I am a HUGE Disney fan). There were a lot of rolls of film used, a lot of 4x6 pictures printed at the drug store. And my mom complained about every single one of them. She wanted all the benefits of my digital camera - picking specific pictures to print, resizing them and setting them against various backgrounds for her very own scrap book - but none of the work involved in talking me into doing this on her behalf.

Disney has managed to solve this problem for my mom and I (and many other people, I suspect). They came up with this thing called PhotoPass. Professional photographers with some pretty fancy digital cameras are located at all the major photo ops in every Disney theme park waiting to take your photo. These guys are very easy to spot. The rule of thumb: if you find a location where you would like to take a pic, look around because one of the photographers is sure to be there decked in Disney gear with a large camera in hand. They are also located at all character photo spots (making it easy to document all your character sightings).

After your first picture is taken, the photographer will hand you a PhotoPass card, which is the size of a credit card. Each time you take a picture with one of the PhotoPass staff, your card will be scanned to add the additional photos taken. Typically, the photographers will take two to three pictures at the time, just so that you have a few choices. As far as I understand, your pictures are posted to the PhotoPass Web site right away (it's magic!) - simply log into the site to view and share your photos. The pictures are stored online for 30 days after they are taken. The web site allows you to print selected pictures in various sizes, edit your photos, and even create your own scrap book (print or DVD).

The concept is very cool, but I question the price. As I log in to look at over 80 photos from my vacation, I notice that the price in the drop down menu shows $12.95 for 5x7 glossy print. Wait! For one picture? To test this, I add eight photos in my cart - all sized at 5x7. My total: $106.09. No way! If the whole purpose of taking these photos was to print them out, bring your own camera and take your memory stick to Target.

Now, Disney will also kindly burn a CD for you with all your photos. That's right - you cannot download these for free and store them on your computer (that whole "right-click, save image as" function does not work - hah!). The CD will cost you $125, which is about the same as printing 10 5x7 glossies. Hmmm. That's a no-brainer.

In addition to these products, you can also order your very own Photo Movie, Photo Book, and Photo Postcards. Not sure about the cost for these, because for some reason the site was unable to load my pictures when I selected these products. But I suspect that these services may be the only ones worth paying for since these items would be unique to Disney and your experience there (unless, of course, you can create such projects on your own).

Overall, I love the concept, but I am not sold on the price. For now, I'll stick to taking my own darn pictures.

For additional details on visiting Walt Disney World, please check out my "Walt Disney World Travel Series" articles.