Could someone please explain photopass?

[VBAndrea]

I don't quite understand photopass. Where do you get your photopass card from and how does it work? Does each member of your party get a card or just one for your family? And do you just give the card to a CM where you want your picture taken? Sorry, new here and a bit confused. The last time I was at Disney was over 10 years ago and it seems so much is new. If anyone could direct me to a thread or good link explaining the photopass I'd greatly appreciate it

 

[ktlm]

You start by just going up to any Photopass photographer and asking them to take your picture and telling them you don't have a card yet. They will take your picture and give you one card. The card has a number on it. From that point on you hand your card to each photopass photographer when they take pictures for you and they scan it. That is how all of your pictures are located. Take a picture of the number on the card with your digital camera in case you lose the card- it works best with the card lying flat in a darker area. If you forget the card one day, you can get a new card. Also if your family splits up and a different group wants pictures, they can get a new card. On the photopass website you can use more than one card number to pull up pictures. For the character meals that have photo packages you don't use your card, there is a number on the edge of the photo you can use to put them on your photopass account. You will log in to photopass and put all of the card numbers you have in to pull up pictures. All the photos will go into your one account.

 

[Disneychix]

I'm not sure where a photopass thread may be but I can help out with some of your questions

1. When you first enter a park (or some resorts and DTD) you can go to any one of the photopass photogs and they will give you a card.
2. You can keep giving this card to every photog you see throughout your trip.
3. If your group gets split up or you just forget your card you can have more than one at the same time.
4. You can go to the photopass stations in the parks and DTD to look at your pics.
5. When you get home you can load all your cards onto the website and enhance the pics or edit. Then oder your CD!

 

[VBAndrea]

Thanks to both of you for explaining the details. I was hoping it might be a way to get some family shots. It will save me from having to ask dh to take pictures (like I at did at dd's pony bday party where he got a total of ZERO pictures of dd riding a pony) and it will give us some family pics without having to do the tripod and timer. Also nice that we can preview the pics before ordering.

 

[ktlm]

I don't know if you are thinking about just ordering a couple of pictures, or plan on getting a CD full of them. The pictures individually can be around $15 each, so if you think you will get a bunch, the CD is a much better deal. You can put ALL the pictures on the CD and they give you a copyright release so you can print them anywhere. If your kids like to take pictures with the characters, you can get a ton of photopass pics as the majority (but not all) the characters have photographers with them. Our last trip, we had close to 200 photopass pictures, and by the time I added, autographs, borders, sizes, zooms, crops etc., we wound up with almost 900 pictures on our CD. You get a discount if you pre-order.Here is the link where you can pre-order the CD:

http://www.disneyphotopass.com/previsitcdplan.aspx

I have heard if you don't like the pictures when you get home, you can get a refund instead of getting the CD, but that has never happened to us.
Be careful about previewing in the parks. You have 30 days to input your photopass number. Once your photopass number has been input then, you only have 30 days to edit and order the pictures. If you input the numbers at the parks it will start your 30 days running, so if you do it to look at some on the 1st day, and you are staying a week, you cut a week off of the time you have to edit and add borders to the pictures at home. You can spend ALOT of time editing pictures. You can zoom and crop, create different versions with multiple borders, autographs etc. If you add borders, you also need to save the pictures in the different sizes you might want to print, otherwise, when you print some of the borders can be cut off. The photopass site has other products too. You can create books, mousepads, christmas ornaments, etc. The last 2 trips we have pre-ordered the CD/Book combo and we love our books!!!

 

[VBAndrea]

I don't know if you are thinking about just ordering a couple of pictures, or plan on getting a CD full of them.
I have heard if you don't like the pictures when you get home, you can get a refund instead of getting the CD, but that has never happened to us.

Thanks for the additional info. I would order the cd rather than individual pics, but it sounds like we'd have to be like you and get tons of pics taken to get our money's worth out of it. My dd is good about getting her pic taken with characters but ds is generally not. I will double check that we can cancel the cd order if we don't like it b/c naturally I would prefer to preorder and save the $$$. Thanks so much for the link and the valuable info (I won't preview any photos at the park now!).