The Dark Side of Disney - Leonard Kinsey [24]
PhotoPass Shares:
One of the best mementos a family can take away from WDW is a set of photographs they can look at forever to relive their (hopefully) wonderful vacation. But the annoying thing about family photos is that you either have to bug a stranger to take the picture for you (thus risking an annoyed stranger, a shitty picture, and possibly a snatch and run camera theft) or someone from the family has to take the picture themselves and not be included in what might have otherwise been a perfect group photo for the mantle.
Luckily, Disney offers a service called PhotoPass which solves this problem: they hire photographers to roam the most picturesque spots in the parks, just waiting to take a once-in-a-lifetime picture of you, your wife, your eight kids and grandkids, and Crazy Uncle Billy, who just got out of prison and will probably be back there a month from now, all smiling in front of Cinderella’s Castle.
The first time you run into one of these well-marked (they’re almost always wearing khaki vests) if not exactly well-trained photographers they will hand you a plastic card with a number on it. Every time you want a picture, you hand that same card to the photographer, they take your picture, and then they scan the card. Everybody in the family can get their own card, too, in case you get sick of Crazy Uncle Billy and decide to strike off on your own and get Photopass pictures of you drinking various alcoholic beverages around the world at Epcot. Then when you get home you type each card number into http://www.DisneyPhotoPass.com and all of the pictures from your entire vacation are there for you to preview! You can then edit the photos, delete incriminating ones, add fancy borders and other such nonsense, and then have them all put on a CD and shipped to you!
Unfortunately, in typical Disney fashion they also charge out the ass for this service. Regardless of how many pictures you actually had taken, the cost is still about $120 for the CD. So if you only had eight pictures taken, and only one was actually in focus and properly exposed by the decidedly amateur-level photographer, you’re going to pay $120 for that one picture. Conversely, if you were there for a month and had 800 pictures taken, it still costs $120 for the CD (or multiple CDs if needed). The only catch is that you need to enter your card numbers within 30 days of having the pictures taken, and then you have 30 days after that to order your photos.
Hopefully you’re starting to see how this system is ripe for exploitation. Some brilliant Dark-Sider realized that if a) you can enter as many cards as you want into the PhotoPass site, and b) they’ll send you as many pictures as you want, then c) multiple families visiting within a 30-day period can type their card numbers into the site and share a single CD. And thus was born the “PhotoPass Share”!
I use TourGuideMike.com for my PhotoPass shares, but they’re organized on any number of WDW fan boards. The way it works is that someone becomes an “owner” for a particular group, meaning that this person will be the one who purchases the CD, makes copies of the CD for everyone in the group, and mails out the copies. Then people sign up for a particular group, depending on when they’ll be visiting WDW. Once there are enough people signed up (usually up to 10 families) the group is closed and everyone sends in the money for the PhotoPass pre-order via check or PayPal, the cost of which is split equally between the families. It usually ends up costing about $20 per family, which is a huge discount over the initial price and actually makes this service a bargain! When each family gets back from vacation they type their code into the site and wait. Once all of the families in the group have come home and entered their codes the “owner” orders the CD, makes copies, and sends out the copies to everyone in the