Photo finishing retailers are grappling with how to survive in an environment where people are less likely to print their photos.
Telus-owned Black Photo Corp. rolled out BlackBerry and iPhone applications this week to make the process easier for customers to upload photos from their phones to get them printed at Black’s locations.
It’s a smart move, according to David Haueter, the associate director of Massachusetts-based research organization InfoTrends.
He said that while photography via smartphones and camera phones is on the rise, the use of traditional digital cameras is on the wane.
“We conducted consumer surveys of how many digital photos did you take over a three-month period. It’s been declining every year for the past three years,” Haueter told Business in Vancouver September 29.
“A lot of the cause for this is that the novelty of a digital camera has worn off. People are used to them now. When people got them for the first time and had them for the first few years, it was kind of neat. They thought, ‘I can take as many photos as I like.’”
Haueter believes people are getting overwhelmed with the number of photos on their hard drives and have become more selective about when they take photos.
See next week’s print edition of BIV for more on the evolution of the photography retail sector.