Kinzin Photo Service

If you're anything like me 99% of your photos are on your computer or on an Internet website.

Before I got my first digital camera I always got 2 sets of every roll of film I had developed. 1 for us and 1 to give away. I also got my photos on CD so I could put them on our website or email them, but I faithfully put my paper photos in albums and my albums on my bookshelf.

Raise your hand if you still do that? Anyone?

Bueler? Bueler?

When H&H were born I was pretty good about ordering photos for my grandparents and sending them off for them to view. My parents and the in-laws were on their own. They know how to email and download as well as the rest of us. But then we'd visit the in-laws and we'd see the snapshots printed out on regular printer paper. Cute. But not exactly a lasting keepsake.

Enter Kinzin, a new photo web site that I had the chance to review for PBN.

Kinzin is a social media site, but with a lot more control. You can create a page for your kids, or each of them, share updates and photos with your family. Or, if you have relatives who like to have a nice photo to put in a frame, Kinzin can do that for you too. You can also share your photos on a more public site like Facebook and Kinzin is free.

Sure, you can do a lot of that stuff on many different sites. But what makes Kinzin unique is its photo mailing service. For $2.99 a month, Kinzin will send 10 photos to the address of your choice. For every 2 subscriptions you purchase, the third is free. That's really not much more than you pay for digital prints you do yourself at your local store and Kinzin eliminates the hassle of printing out the photos and then remembering to actually mail them instead of leaving them on the floor of your car for 5 months. (Oh, wait. You mean I'm the only one who does that?)

Yes, you can do this yourself. But how many of you actually do it? On a regular basis? C'mon, be honest now! OK, if you're organized to do that yourself, I hate you.

Kinzin gave me 3 free year long subscriptions to their photo mailing service. I selected my parents, the in-laws, and myself to get the photos. Every month Kinzin will take the last 10 photos uploaded to my site, print them out, and mail them to the people on my subscription list. How cool is that???

There are a few things I would change about the Kinzin site. For some reason, I can never find my way directly to the area for uploading prints for the photo mailing service. I kept uploading them to my kids' individual photo streams.

Don't get me wrong, the photo streams are nice. You can type in some notes or an update with every photo so the family can keep track of what your kids are doing daily. But I would like the photos uploaded to my kids' individual pages to automatically be in my outbox for the print mailings. That doesn't seem to be how it works now. I'd also like to be able to upload more than one photo at a time. I tend to upload photos in batches and not 1 or 2 a day.

There have also been a few kinks in getting the photos out, but I think that's just because Kinzin was trying to rush photos out for their reviewers. I have no reason to think there's any problem with their photo mailings on a regular basis.

My dad received the first batch of photos late last week. He said they look great and he and my mom are both laughing over the photo of Holden with the crayon up his nose. (See above.) I haven't gotten my photos yet, so I'll let you know what I think about the photo quality as soon as mine arrive.

Overall, I'm really liking Kinzin. For only $2.99 a month it takes away a lot of my hassle and makes the grandparents happy. It's worth it! Barring any problems over the next year, I'll definitely be paying for my subscriptions next year.