Your boutique photo service. No ads. Great prices. Excellent support since 1999.
Author: dotphoto
Glenn Paul is President and Co-Founder of dotPhoto, which began life in 2000 as a photo printing service and now also distributes user-generated media in Flash, video and on cell phones.
“Where did you get that beautiful frame?” A visitor had spotted the framed print waiting for delivery. “It picks up the colors in the painting.”
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” I agreed. “The best part is that dotphoto allows you to see the finished frame even before you order it. If you’ve ever tried to frame something, they show you corners, and you hope for the best.”
What you see is what you’ll get: design it, see it, order it.
Custom-cut for your image – not limited to standard sizes like 16×24 or 30×40
Our frames include heavy-duty interlocking hangers. Attach one set to the wall, and slide your framed print over them for a safe and sturdy installation.
Stephen Wilkes creates “Day to Night” photographs by planting himself in one spot for 24 hours and snapping as many as 1,500 photographs of the same frame.
When he’s done, he chooses the photos that capture the greatest hits of the 24-hour period, and lays them over one another to create one grand image. The result is stunning.
My grandparents displayed framed photos of people in black tie dinners on a guest room wall. I will never know who the people were and what they were celebrating. The significance of many photos – perhaps most – is lost to history because most photos are unmarked.
dotphoto enables you to add titles and names to the front of any photo with the dotphoto Editor. Share your family history by adding some narrative to important photos. You can keep the original photo in your dotphoto account as well as the annotated version.
dotphoto’s small-print lab has installed new back-printing equipment that will again reliably print on the back of small photos including 3×5, 4×6, 4xD, and 5×7.
The default back-print is the photo file name or caption and the photo capture date or upload date. The back-print field is 40 characters long.
You can set your default back-printing in your dotphoto account’s Printing Options.
dotphoto wins Best Photography Mobile Website for 2021 dotphoto’s responsive mobile display, convenient command structure, and comprehensive upload makes dotphoto work as well on mobile as on a desktop. No need to install and update apps!
Why the Mobile Web is Replacing Apps When the web first started, photos transferred very slowly at 300 bits per second. Today, the average speed of wireless 5G is is 50 megabits per second – so fast that many people are disconnecting their cable and fiber landlines. We no longer need apps as intermediary software to handle slow transfer rates. Everything can happen in the cloud.
Every month, photographers, newspapers, clubs, schools, museums, and artists earn thousands of dollars by selling their photos on dotphoto.
Turn your uploads into money. dotphoto fulfills your orders, handles customer service, and sends you money! Here’s how:
dotphoto frees up your time and handles customer service. dotphoto fulfills your orders — and also handles problems. If a shipper loses an order, we re-print it at no cost to you. If a customer’s download link goes into their “spam” box, we take the call and re-send their link. If there is a quality problem, we ensure that your customers are happy. At the end of the year, we send your tax record — a 1099 form for accounts that earn over $600 (PayPal handles 1099s for its payments.)
People often don’t respond to emails. Email addresses change, emails are ignored, or email systems shunt messages into an unmonitored box – even though you might be a good friend.
At dotphoto, when we want to remind people that they have photos in an abandoned account, we sometimes send a photo letter. A dotphoto letter often reaches people who can no longer receive emails. Also, you can send a note right from your desk that is printed on photographic paper and stands out from other mail.
How to send a photo letter through dotphoto There are two ways to create a photo letter:
Using dotphoto’s image editor, create a text and photo message, and send it by mail.
Using your own desktop software, create a JPG image that fits a 4×6, 5×7 or 8×10 print. Upload it to dotphoto, print and send. You can also write a letter in your word processor, capture it on your screen, and send it as a photo.
We collected and colorized some of the first photographed celebrities in history to create this dotphoto show. Among others, these include probably the first person born to be photographed, sixth president John Quincy Adams, a 16-year-old Emily Dickinson, a survivor of the Revolutionary War, Harriet Tubman, the Wright Brothers, and more.
Learn more below on how to colorize your older images in one click. The ideal size for a dotphoto slide? 1350 pixels wide by 900 pixels tall.
The Photomyne web app colorizes black and white photos in one step. Could you do a better job if you were an artist and spent an hour on each image? Maybe, but this colorizes in a single step. We used it for the celebrity slideshow and for this photo taken of a nurse in the 1940s. You can upload your black-and-white photos to Photomyne directly from dotphoto.
When beloved comedian Norm Macdonald passed away, a video circulated of Norm explaining the evolution of photography in about a minute. As always, he was right on target.
We’ve collected some other photography jokes, which we hope you’ll enjoy. Here’s to Norm, whose dry, laugh-out-loud humor we will dearly miss.
My wife emailed me our wedding photos, but I couldn’t open any of the files. I have trouble with emotional attachments.
INTERVIEWER: What makes you think you can be an executioner? PHOTOGRAPHER: I shoot people and sometimes cut off their heads.
HOW TO IRITATE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHER “After you take that shot with your camera, can you take one with my phone?”
The woman next to me on the train pulled out a photo of her husband and said, “He’s handsome, isn’t he?” I said, “If you think he’s handsome, you should see my husband!” “Why?” she said. “Is he hot, too?” “No,” I said. “He’s an optometrist!”
I just got a photo from a “speed camera” through the mail. I sent it right back – way too expensive and really bad quality.
I have a photo of me and the lead singer of REM. That’s me in the corner and that’s him in the spotlight.
I found a ghost who wanted to pose for a photo! Unfortunately, it came out underexposed. The spirit was willing, but the flash was weak.
A woman goes into a pharmacy and asks for cyanide. The pharmacist is shocked, and asks, “Why do you need cyanide?” “I plan to poison my husband”, she tells him. “I’m sorry, but there’s absolutely no way I can give you cyanide for that,” the pharmacist says angrily. The woman reaches into her purse and takes out a hidden-camera photo of her husband sleeping with the pharmacist’s wife. “Sorry,” says the pharmacist, “I didn’t realize you had a prescription.”
Teach your kids about photography, and they will never have enough money to buy drugs.
I’ve been giving my friends T-shirts with their photos printed on them for their birthdays. Half of them think it’s hilarious. The other half want to know how I got pictures of them sleeping.
A man is on a photo safari in Africa. He finds an elephant in distress, lying in the bushes. The elephant has a sharp rock embedded in the bottom of its foot. The man carefully pulls the rock free, and the elephant gets up and strolls away. A decade later, the man is back in his hometown when a visiting circus puts on a parade. Watching the animals pass, the man makes eye contact with a large African elephant. The elephant immediately turns toward the man, picks him up in its trunk, slams him on the pavement, and stomps the life out of him. Different elephant.
I finally figured out why I look so bad in photos. It’s my face.
Most of us want to be remembered by our loved ones, and we have interesting experiences and lessons to impart to the next generation. Many people publish their memoirs in retirement, but some of the best stories that were not recorded as they happened are lost to time.
How best to pass along your experiences and wisdom? This newsletter features some powerful, easy and surprisingly inexpensive tools for publishing your memoir. These text tools are not dotphoto services, but dotphoto is a great place to preserve, edit and print your best pictures.
Printing your memoir Countless friends have spent $5000 to $20,000 to publish their memoirs, which is a shame because you can do it for free – and many of the memoir “publishers” use the same free service.
In 2005, Amazon bought CreateSpace, a self-publishing service that enables you to upload, distribute and print your own books. The service has been re-branded Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and the software is greatly improved: format your word-processed document to the size of your book, save it as a PDF, and upload the PDF to KDP.
KDP will sell your book on Amazon, make it available on the Kindle eBook, and even enable distributors and bookstores to buy your book. Stores are unlikely to stock your book, but your friends can buy your book online or special-order through stores, and you can buy single copies from KDP for dollars each – rather than paying for 1000 books upfront from the typical memoir publisher.
The most important element of a good story is drama: that is, the reader wonders how the story will turn out. Because most amateur memoirs have little drama, they often go unread. The typical memoir theme is: I overcame every difficulty to become the successful person I am today. The truth about most of our lives is that we are buffeted by winds we cannot control, we nearly drown, we struggle, we are rescued, and we are happy we survived – and sometimes thrived. Our actual drama is more satisfying than the myth we tell ourselves. If you want your family to read your memoir, capture the drama. Be self-effacing, funny, and surprising.
Finding a Ghost Writer A ghost writer can help craft a dramatic story. A site called Fiverr, so named because its original premise was to accomplish small tasks for $5, lists their top ghostwriters here:
The Proper Use of Facebook It’s been a tough week for Facebook, which had a six-hour outage last Monday and a whistleblower testifying in Congress this week. Almost no one has ever made a friend on Facebook, but the service is a good blogging site. I use Facebook to record interesting experiences that I would probably forget in the long run. Sometimes, my friends give me feedback; sometimes, they pay little attention, but these experiences are not lost to time.
Every two years, I ask MySocialBook (not a Facebook or dotphoto service) to print a 380-page, color book of my Facebook posts and many of the comments. With a coupon code, the price of the book is about $85.
How dotphoto helps preserve your memories Photos are essentially memory keys. We see a picture, and our minds flood with associated thoughts and feelings. It’s why they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Dotphoto Club, Family and Pro members can store images up to 6000 pixels on a single side – or up to 36 megapixels (6000 x 6000). By comparison, Facebook downsizes images to 2048 pixels or up to 4.2 megapixels (2048 x 2048) — only 11.7% the resolution of dotphoto. dotphoto’s added resolution is particularly helpful for group photos, panoramas, or any photo that might be cropped to highlight some person or event – for instance, a close-up of a person in a sporting event or crossing a graduation stage.
When I post on Facebook, I first upload my photos to dotphoto where they can be preserved in high resolution. Then I edit and crop the photo, and copy and paste the photo from dotphoto to Facebook. Because Facebook is not saving a high-resolution image, I’m not concerned about pasting in a screen image for my blog.
If you edit the titles of your dotphoto pictures, you can print them on the back of your 4x6s, and those prints will act as excellent memory keys when you are ready to write your memoir.
Other websites we like MasterClass: Learn how to write your memoir
One of the best ways to learn anything is to study the most successful people in the field. MasterClass is a streaming service that you can run on Roku, your phone, or any smart TV. Steve Martin teaches humor, great coaches teach team building, and you can learn how to write practically any form from Shonda Rhimes, Aaron Sorkin, Dan Brown, David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, Neil Gaiman, R.L. Stine, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, and many others.
Braxton Wilhelmsen has some interesting observations at Fstoppers such as “If you’d like your work to really come across as art, the concept should predate the shutter actuation.” If you imagine your goal, then every decision supports that goal.
Wilhelmsen also cites a mastery of these photography fundamentals: “Shape, line, texture, perspective, value, color, negative space, focus.” Now that digital photographs can be further monetized with NFTs, it is interesting to consider the question, “What turns a photograph into art?“
dotphoto photobooks make thoughtful gifts that will be cherished forever. Add multiple photos per page, wrap a single photo around the front and back cover, and add a title to the spine. Customize every aspect of your book.
Economy shipping is free, and 20-page 8×10 photo books are only $29.99 Up to 60 pages per book.
NFTs or “non-fungible tokens” are a popular new way of selling art or photos. NFTs are tracked on the Ethereum blockchain, and enable someone to buy and own the original copy. Oddly, you can buy the original, but the digital copies are the same quality. If you are a photographer, it is good to know that NFTs also enable you to collect a fee each time the item sells. You can also retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork, but you would need to stipulate that in the sale agreement.
To try your hand at selling NFT images, two of the biggest markets are OpenSea.io and Rarible.com
Getting more out of dotPhoto 