Electronic delivery
It seems like more and more people today are delivering their goods and services electronically. The electronic delivery of photographs is a trend in this direction.
Look at our world today. Do you want a new book to read? Just go to your tablet device and download it. Do you have to sign a contract? It can be sent to you electronically and you can sign it electronically without ever picking up a pen.
The history of photography has been the delivery of paper photographs. Unless you are very young, you remember buying film for your camera, taking the film to a print shop and getting paper prints back in an envelope. That just doesn’t happen anymore. The digital age revolutionized photography, and very few photographers buy and use film anymore.
The shift to digital photography had many photographers putting their photos on a compact disc or DVD, and then delivering the disc to their client. That still is a very common form of photographic delivery, and we at Moments in Time Images still use these discs. It can be very handy just to pop the disc into your computer or DVD player and look at your photos.
The trend now, however, is to even do away with the discs, and we are starting to shift in that direction. MIT Images recently signed up with a service that will provide for the complete electronic delivery of photographs. There is no need to load them onto a disc, you just upload them into a software program, hit a few keys and off they go to the client. The client will get the photos nicely displayed on their monitor, and they can download them, post them, email them or print them as they choose. The program we are now using even allows clients to order prints directly from our professional lab to be shipped to their home.
What are the advantages of this? Well on our end, it can be a time savings. We no longer have to buy discs, print labels for them, burn them and deliver them. With just a few key strokes we can have the photos into our clients’ possession. For our clients, the advantages are many. They can look at their photos all together rather than having to open them one at a time. They don’t have to worry about scratching or losing a disc. They can conveniently have their photos printed with a strike of a key.
We will still provide discs upon request, but we feel the electronic delivery of photographs is a much more advanced way of delivery. One side benefit that you likely don’t know about is we don’t have to charge you sales tax with the electronic delivery of photos.
