While I now love the convenience that consumer photo-sharing and printing sites such as Snapfish and Shutterfly offer, I admit that I haven’t always been in love with the online process.

I consider myself pretty technologically savvy for a thirtysomething mom: I navigate my iPod with ease, I text-message my husband and friends, and I can even figure out how to fix my MacBook laptop when things go awry (forget about PCs, though — they’re a whole different animal). Yet when I first joined the online photo portal world four years ago when my son was born (I’m a Snapfish member), I was annoyed by some of the glitches that I soon encountered during my uploading endeavors.

For a supposed time-saver, using this type of online service didn’t seem that convenient when I had to check each individual photo in my image library, a process that wasted many a summer afternoon when I should have been playing with my infant. Plus, more often that not, I would finally finish uploading all the images, only to find that half of them hadn’t uploaded correctly, or at all.

Now I know that I’m not the only one who has felt this type of photographic frustration. A new study by digital media management company Memeo shows that other consumers are also working around the kinks and conundrums that still plague some of these online solutions. The study found that some of the respondents’ biggest gripes were the time it takes to upload photos (36%) and that family members who want to access these photos can’t figure out how to use the sites (19%). (I can certainly relate to that last point — I don’t even want to reveal how many hours I’ve spent in an e-mail trail with my 80-year-old grandmother trying to explain to her how to see her great-grandkids on her computer screen as she tries to mouse around the Snapfish or Flickr screen.)

To be fair, things are much better these days than they were during the last Summer Olympics — I’m happy to report that I can now select multiple photos at once to upload, go stir the Classico, and come back a little later to view all my albums online. The service I use (still Snapfish) now offers a ton of gifts, photo books, and other photo accoutrements that keep me shopping for hours (I especially love the collage-poster option — I’ve started a tradition of creating a 20 x 30 version every holiday season to showcase my family’s favorite photos from the entire year, which I display next to the previous year’s version in our hallway).

Most telling (and most disturbing to those of us in the industry) from this Memeo survey, however, is that a whopping 79% of respondents revealed they have taken digital pictures they’ve intended to share, but never did. The photo industry still has a lot of work to do in terms of educating consumers and eliminating the intimidation factor. Only then will photo sharing reach its full potential online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Jennifer Gidman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.