A recent online conversation which created a lot of interest on information sharing website Reddit reveals that there is a long tale of consumers out there who still haven’t got much of a clue about how to print photos from cameras and devices.
While Richard Prince is generating wealth and infamy with his Facebook prints, it appears some people take this course because they don’t know any better. The discussion was kicked off by a Reddit contributor tagged ‘OutbackBrah’ who noticed that his aunt was printing screenshots at Walmart direct from Facebook’s mobile app.
This was followed by a chorus of comments from people who worked in photo retail outlets to the effect that this was far more common than most of us would expect. One photo lab employee estimated around 20 percent of orders are direct from screenshots!
Other comments were from people sharing the experiences of their phototechnology-challenged relatives.
Here’s a selection from the many hundreds of observations on the phenomenon:
– I work photo desk at a Walgreens, this happens quite often.
– Worked at a Walmart photo center for a while, its a constant thing.
– I work at a photo department at a big box store like WalMart. you have no clue how many people do that.
– I run the photo department at the Walgreens I work at and this kills me every time. Some people bring their phones in to do it in store and I literally take their phone and download the photo from Facebook/a text message for them because they have no concept of what to do and I don’t have enough time to explain it to them…
– My mother has done this multiple times.
– I work at a store that does photos and this happens a lot. Even better the machines allow you to log into Facebook to get the photos.
– Worked at CVS. People did this a lot. Screenshot texts too haha.
– Hi I work in a photo lab. People that do that then complain that their photos come out bad are the bane of my existence.
– My mother-in-law takes photos of her computer screen with a camera to have copies of photos of grandchildren off Instagram. She tries. (I gave her the digital files when I found out, but who knows if that helps at all)
– My mother takes pictures of photos she has on the computer, snaps a photo of the computer screen with her phone and posts that to Facebook from her phone.
– My mom wanted some pictures of her grandson, so I picked out 20 or so and mailed them to her. She replied back and asked me to put them ‘on file’ for her. I told her that I don’t know what that means. Turns out she wanted me to paste them into a Word document for her, she didn’t know how to handle the jpegs. So cute 😀
– This lady I know who says she’s a ‘photographer’ takes cell phone pictures of her computer screen then posts them on Facebook to give them a sample of the photos. I hate it. Grinds my gears.
– When my relatives ask me for photos to print, when I’m sending them a batch of many for them to pick which ones they want ready to print (fully edited on a calibrated screen, sent to them as a large TIF, etc.) I literally put a watermark on them in bright red that says “DON’T F***ING PRINT THESE”. Had to do it after many incidents.
– I had a gentleman call my Tech support job once to get assistance with scanning text messages on his flip style phone onto his computer, so he could print them out and mail them to his relatives who didn’t have phones. I had to mute my phone and bust out laughing after he explained it to me.
– When I worked in a Walmart photo lab we would always get old people printing pictures they took of the TV.
– Is this not a common thing for older folks to do? My mom has been doing this for a long time. She gave me printouts from my wedding like this. Of pictures that I posted.
I worked as a photo tech at Walgreens…. A lot of people do this.
– As someone who used to work at a print shop, I can confirm that this happens CONSTANTLY…
– I work at Walmart in the photo department. I see this several times a day.
– I work in a photo lab, you wouldn’t believe how many people print instagram and snapchat screenshots.
– Photo tech from Walgreens here. This is a good 20%+ of the photos that come through my store. And more than half of them are from middle and high schoolers. Everyone assumes that the newer generations know technology. I know the truth, and it’s painful to see.
– I did a boudoir photo shoot for my husband for our 1st anniversary gift. Mainly lingerie stuff. Anyway, there’s one photo showing only my head/shoulders and I look pretty awesome so I posted it on Facebook. My grandmother took a photo of her computer screen using her digital camera, then had the photo printed. She now proudly displays one of my boudoir photos in her home.
– This is infuriating to me. I work in the printing business and the amount of people who come in not even knowing how to use their phones is just crazy. Why do you have the latest smartphone of you don’t know how to use it and refuse to learn……
– I work in a photo lab. You have no idea how common this is. I saw people mocking this in the thread. This is where everything is going. I’d say 80% of photos are from phones and half that is from people screenshotting FB or their text messages… Wtf is wrong with everyone. Buy a damn camera
– Walmart and FB could be rolling in dough if they could figure out how to make it super mindblowingly simple for Grams to send photos in to be printed at the local Walmart.
– As someone who works in a photo lab, I see this all the time. Customers look at me like a lunatic when I show them how to save pictures to their phone and then print them.
– I am not joking when I say my mom just did the exact same thing!!! She wanted to give my grandma a photo album for her birthday and fill it with pictures. ALL the photos were screenshots off Instagram!!!
– Walgreens Photo Tech here…you’d be surprised at how often this happens. Most of the time it’s teenagers who you would imagine would know better.
– My gf’s mom does this all the bloody time, I’ve shown her how to do it the right way, so has my gf. Still does it…
– I work in a Walmart photo lab and see this ALL THE DAMN TIME. If they’re on the machines and I catch them I offer to help them crop the extraneous crap out if possible, but otherwise yeah I see this happen every other day.
– My mother-in-law took photos of her dad’s artwork on a low resolution, blew them up, had them professionally printed and then paid to have them mounted and framed. She doesn’t understand why I haven’t hung up any of them and its because I can see every half inch pixel from like three feet away.
– My mother takes pictures of photos she has on the computer, snaps a photo of the computer screen with her phone and posts that to Facebook from her phone.
– I used to work in a photo lab and there was a regular customer who would do this. She would come in every 1-3 months and print between 300 and 1200 photos, about 95% of which were screenshots. There were recipes, urban legends, awkward family photos, and more. I showed her multiple times how to download the photos to her phone instead but she insisted that she liked the way it looked as a screenshot.
– My mom steals photos from people by screen shotting them and posting them to her own page. She also tried to copy a photo by putting her phone -really- close to a picture and taking a picture.
– I work in a camera store with a photo lab, and you’ll be surprised just how often this happens. And not always by old people. They’ll go into Facebook, see the picture they want on their friend’s page, and instead of selecting the ‘Save Image’ option, they just screenshot the bastard. Half the time, they don’t even change the goddamn orientation. It gets really annoying, especially when they want that photo blown up to ungodly sizes.
– This will probably become a thing.
– One time my grandmother went to Walmart and got a screen shot of a screen shotted texting conversation on the iPhone…you could barely read the conversation…she wanted it printed out because of a picture in the conversation.
– I helped a lady develop photos like this once. I recognized her daughter and texted her asking if she could explain to her mother how to save photos directly from Facebook, or to at least send her mother the pictures, since they were from her Facebook, lol.
– I work at a photo department at a big box store like WalMart. you have no clue how many people do that. Or print screenshots of texts that they got. Not like incriminating texts either, mostly teenage girls printing one from their current fling.
– My grandma printed out pictures from Facebook, enlarged them until they were almost too pixelated to see, and has them framed throughout her home. Imagine my surprise when I saw my profile pic from 5 years ago?
– I use to work tech support for a similar one hour photo / photo gift ordering website. Seeing the OP’s photos made me have a flashback as we’d get people all the time doing this, and then blowing them up to canvases, or woven blankets. And then they would call us idiots for printing the stuff around the photos, or complain that the final product was pixelated.
And finally:
– “Hello, how can I help?”
– “Uh yes, my dearest friend sent me pictures from her Facebook and it has a low battery, how do I charge it?”
– “What?”
– “Right here on the photo it has little red battery.”
– “Ma’am, I can’t see the picture over the phone.”
– “OK, let me take a picture of it.” dial tone
– “sigh”
[5 minutes later]
– “Hello, how may I help you?”
– “Yeah, it’s me again. Did you get the photograph?”
– “That’s not how it works.”
– “I’d like to speak to your supervisor.”
groooan -click-
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