I needed a reliable way of storing my photos, and there is nothing more reliable that having them physically printed. I have had a terrible experience with digital copies, when my hard drive crashed in 2006 (just before exams too!), and I lost all of the data. My bad, didn’t keep any back ups, nor hard copies of files/photos. Lesson learned.

I researched some companies that offer prints of digital photos. I came across Get Digital. They have excellent prices (10c standard print), and great gift items too.

The process
I created an account online, and began the process. I had some issues with uploading my photos, because the java applet would not load appropriately for me. So I had to manually uploaded all 218 photos! (10 at a time) Took me a while, but I got there in the end.

The service
During the process I emailed customer support and to my surprise, my email queries were answered within a few hours. Here are some examples:
- Query sent: April 3 12.48PM, Reply: April 3 1.29PM
- Query sent: April 3 10.01PM, Reply: April 4 8.34AM (note: overnight response to late night emails!!!)
- Query sent: April 4 10.45AM, Reply: April 4 10.57AM (note: 2 minute response time!!)

That is incredible! I have never experienced such fast customer support from a private organization.

Then April 4th morning at 8.39AM, I got this email:

Dear Raja Devanathan
We would like to advise you that your order (Order Id: ********) has been processed and is now being dispatched.

Please allow 24 hours for Melbourne Metropolitan and for all other locations, please allow 48 to 72 hours for us to deliver your order to your chosen pickup point.

Order Pickup Point
——————-
WOOD PHARMACY
R CHILD’S HOSP’L FLEMINGTON RD
PARKVILLE, VIC, 3052
Ph: 03 93474205
——————-
If you have any queries please feel free to call us on one of the number provided below or simply reply to this email.

That’s phenomenal!

Inside tips
* If you want gift items, do it at the same time as printing photos because the $2 handling fee is charged each time an order is placed
* If you want super duper quality, then this may not be for you. Remember, a 10MP image worth 4MB printed onto a 10cm by 15cm photo might turn out well despite Get Digital compressing the images. I wonder if image compression is an issue when you order larger prints such as canvases.

Suggestions
* The image uploader program is annoying, and takes ages to load. Easy way to provide an alternative is to allow more than 10 photos to be simple uploaded at a time.

This is an interim rating, so I will follow up the post with an official rating once I get my photos and check the quality. So far, a big thumbs up.(What is an interim rating?)

Interim rating: Excellent