If you have just returned from sunnier climes, the chances are that one of the first things you'll want to do is send off your holiday snaps for developing.
When you pick up the prints, you will then perform a ritual repeated up and down the land at this time of year. It goes as follows: step one: moan about how many of the photos are a) out of focus or b) have the 'red eye' effect, which makes everyone look like the living dead; step two: question whether taking 23 shots of the inside of your apartment was really necessary; step three: wish you had removed the lens cap on several occasions; and, step four: return to the store to obtain the few reprints you think are good enough to send to friends and family. A palaver.
But this post-holiday ritual may not last much longer. A raft of online 'e-photo' firms are competing via the internet to process your photographs, and save you time and money.
The e-photo industry which, inevitably, started life in the US, works like this. You send off your film in a freepost envelope obtained via the web or from a store. The e-photo company then scans the photos and emails you a web address where you can look at the snaps.
You choose the ones you want printed and email them to friends so that they can order their own copies. The company then posts the prints and the negatives.
Most firms in this field scan the films free, and charge only for the prints you order. There are various degrees of privacy, so users can if they wish bar other people from looking at their photographs.
And, because all the online technology allows for interactivity, you can do lots of clever things, such as compile albums of your snaps, choose different borders and captions and, in some cases, touch up the photos to get rid of, say, that annoying red eye. Customers can also have their snaps printed on to everything from T-shirts to mouse pads to mugs.
'This will be the biggest event in the photographic print industry since the launch of 35mm film,' said Ernie Gilburd of easyMemories.com, an e-photo firm soon to be launched in the UK.
Well Gilburd, who until recently headed Minit UK, the firm which owns SupaSnaps, would say that wouldn't he? However, he does join a long list of very big names who are betting on the same hunch.
In the US, Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, has backed Shutterfly.com, which is owned by internet investment giant CMGi; the sector's second-largest firm, ememories.com, is supported by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Disney and George Soros. Jim Barksdale, Netscape's former chief executive, is an investor in ofoto.com, the third-largest e-photo business.
Now the giant of film processors is interested. Last week Kodak, which in 1999 had sales of more than $14 billion and can't afford to see its market dominance threatened, took a stake in ememories to complement its earlier investment in snapfish.com.
In the UK Boots, which processes twice as many films as its nearest rival, will launch its own e -photo service, bootsphoto.com, within the next two weeks. Photo-Me International, the company behind the booths at train stations is also launching a service.
Evangelists for the new industry point to synergies between the internet and photography. 'This sort of service uses a real internet business model,' said Cameron Crockett, a founder of ideaShed, the internet incubator behind easyMemories. 'It's visual and it's light. It's easy for people to see and the service is available to everyone.' easyMemories claims its processing prices will be cheaper than in the high street. Crockett believes the business is adaptable to digitising and distributing both audio and video footage.
So how big is the e-photo industry going to be? Wildly conflicting estimates show just how immature this industry is. According to analysts at Infotrends Technology Group, sales of prints developed by online firms will be worth more than $2.5 billion in 2005, compared with $20 million last year. Lyra, the photography research firm, suggests that in Asia and the Pacific Rim e-photo services will be worth nearly $650m in 2002.
Crockett argues that the internet will expand the photography market. 'When APS technology [the new sort of film which makes it easier to index your prints] came out, the number of reprints as a percentage of sales went up. With these new e-photo services, in just three clicks everybody's got the index to your photos.'
Similarly, he believes that the rise in the number of digital cameras will not threaten the e-photo firms: they will still make their money from printing the snaps, even if they no longer have to process them.
In fact companies such as Zing.com, the market leader, are working with hardware partners to create digital cam eras with built-in modems which link directly to the web.
But the revenues generated by the e-photo firms tell only part of the story. One of their strengths is their sites' 'stickiness' - meaning they draw in visitors on a regular basis. This helps to build communities of internet users united around common interests, which in turn attract more visitors as the word spreads. And, where there are communities, there is the chance to sell them things, creating other earnings streams from e-commerce and advertising.
'It's the Hotmail model - uniting users around a common interest. It allows for viral marketing,' Crockett said.
According to technology market research firm PC Data Online, in April the top five e-photo websites in the US attracted nearly 7.5 million users - 10 per cent of the country's internet population. Infotrends says the figure for the whole year will total nearly 100 million.
For this reason the big portal sites have started offering their own online photo ser vices. America Online has its You've Got Pictures service in the US (although not in Europe at the moment), while Yahoo! has struck an alliance with Shutterfly.
One online community site, PhotoPoint.com, even went as far as to offer a fortune to the winner of its 'Million-Dollar Moment' competition, a move which generated huge publicity for the company in the US.
More public relations stunts are inevitable in the coming months as the e-photo companies - of which there are now scores - attempt to grab more market share.
Many of them are unlikely to survive. Lydia Loizides, an analyst with Jupiter Communications, was quoted in Upside Magazine, a technology publication, as saying that the sector is: 'fickle, promotion-intensive and can't make money'.
Crockett agrees that there will be some sort of a shake out. 'In the US there are a considerable number of players. It makes sense for there to be only a few [e-photo firms] in the long term,' he says.
Given the signs of an impending cull, some of the e-photo firms may not remain so snap-happy for long.
