Web Sites Focus on Family Photos and Aim for Profits

Forget digital cameras. The biggest thing happening in photography is the World Wide Web.

Online photo albums are cropping up on a dozen Web sites operated by corporate giants such as Eastman Kodak and Intel and by a passel of “dot-com” upstarts offering to host them for free. The sites could succeed in getting people’s pictures out of their closets and out on display--which, after all, is what photo albums are for.

“It’s a complete revolution in photography,” insists Mark Platshon, chief executive of Zing Network, a San Francisco firm that runs a so-called online picture community. “This changes everything--the way people take pictures, how they share them, and what they do with them.”

Over the last few years, millions of shutterbugs have created their personal Web pages using free services from GeoCities or Tripod to post their photos online, where far-flung friends and family members can easily see them. But it can be cumbersome to build a Web site, and printouts made by visitors are a far cry from the quality of reprints made by photofinishers.

Now a new breed of companies believe they are offering a better solution--and that they can actually make money doing it. They have developed software to make online photo albums easy to create, and most offer password protection for album sites. And some companies will even digitize pictures taken with 35-millimeter film, eliminating the need for a scanner, and put them on the Web. A handful of companies are offering all of these services for free. In exchange, they hope to make money by selling reprints, photo-emblazoned items such as T-shirts and coffee mugs, and by selling online ads.

With most of these photo sites only a few months old, it’s too soon to know which companies will be a hit. Consumers who expect their film to be developed in an hour may not be patient enough for mail-order film processing services offered by some of the companies. Customers will also have to shop around for the best deal, because some sites charge for film processing, digitizing services and online photo storage.

But the idea of an online photo album has already won over hundreds of thousands of users like Phong Ngo, a computer programmer in Fremont whose wife recently gave birth to their first child.

“I didn’t want to send pictures all over the country,” he said. Instead, Ngo set up an album devoted to his daughter on the Club Photo Web site, which offers unlimited storage space at no charge. His friends and family can peruse his pictures and order their own reprints. “It’s easier to do it this way,” Ngo said.

Customers like Ngo could turn online photo sites into a serious business. Amateur photographers in the U.S. took more than 20 million pictures last year, and that number is expected to rise to 29 million by 2002, according to Don Franz, publisher of Photofinising News Letter, in Bonita Springs, Fla. There is no reliable estimate of how many pictures have been uploaded onto the Web. But photos taken with digital cameras--which are more Web-compatible--accounted for 5% of all photos last year, and that is projected to rise about 20% during the next few years, Franz said.

The new crop of Web photo sites could be a boon to digital camera owners. With Web-based services, they can now connect their digital cameras directly to their computers, upload their photos onto Web sites and e-mail them to friends and family. One gripe by digital camera buffs is that printing out their pictures on home computers doesn’t produce a professional-quality photo. But now they can upload the images onto one of the photo Web sites and also order quality prints that can be delivered in the mail.

Meanwhile, for traditional photographers who use 35-millimeter film, getting pictures onto the Web is a little more complicated. These photographers can take advantage of services offered by photofinishers affiliated with Kodak--including drugstores--which will return on a disk digital versions of their pictures, along with traditional prints and negatives for an additional $6 per roll of film. America Online also offers a new program with Kodak, which will post your photos on AOL and e-mail you with their location.

Consumers can also mail their film to Seattle FilmWorks, which charges less than a drugstore for standard film processing and will digitize their images and post them on the Web for free. Once the pictures are converted to digital form, they can be used to build albums on these or other sites.

EMemories.com, a Santa Monica-based start-up that offers free photo-sharing services on the Web, is planning to up the ante. Early next year, the company will begin offering free film processing and post the images on secure Web sites. Then customers can view the pictures and decide which prints to order--for a yet-to-be-determined fee. The pictures can also be organized into online photo albums, which EMemories.com promises to store on the Web at no cost.

“This is such a compelling feature that people are going to start transferring photos from their shoe boxes in the closet,” said Tim Kilpin, EMemories.com’s new chief executive. “Being able to share photos online is a really magical application on the Internet.”

Indeed, family photos are among the most precious of all possessions and having backup copies on a Web site may help spur sales. “I don’t store my money under my mattress, I store it in the bank and they won’t lose it,” Zing’s Platshon said. “I keep my stocks at my stockbroker’s. If I store photos on my computer and my computer is stolen or the kids do something screwy to it, I’m toast. It ought to be a Web application.”

Of course, if any of these start-ups go out of business, your vault of Web photos may instantly vanish.

Still, a growing number of consumers are sold on online photo albums. Most photo companies decline to discuss their revenues and losses, but a few are willing to share their membership numbers, which indicate that the services have widespread appeal. Zing says it has half a million members, for instance, and Campbell-based start-up PhotoLoft.com claims more than 100,000 customers.

And the sites are growing. Some report growth rates of more than 50% a month.

The biggest source of new customers is people who visit online albums. Some albums on Intel’s GatherRound.com site have attracted more than 500 visitors, said Lorie Wigle, general manager of Internet imaging services for the Santa Clara-based chip giant.

Except for the firms that charge for film processing, companies say that most of their revenue comes from selling standard prints and reprints to their customers. So far, that’s not enough to make any of them profitable, though a handful--including Zing and GatherRound.com--say they could be in the black by the end of next year.

Some predict they will ultimately make more money selling reprints to the friends and family members who come to look at albums. A few also expect gift items to eclipse paper prints as their top revenue-generating items.

“What the consumer is saying is, ‘I have a special moment captured in an image, and I want to share that in some way, whether it’s on a T-shirt, a photo, a cookie or a mug,’ ” said Andrew Wei, president and chief executive of Club Photo.

Not surprisingly, the companies agree that the Web will play a big role in the future of consumer photography. But they are divided on whether digitized photos will overtake paper prints.

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Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com.