How You Can Use Photo Kiosk

Photo Kiosk is a highly customizable software, so you can easily configure it in agreement with your needs. This topic considers three different ways to use Photo Kiosk, which are good starting points, namely:

  • self-service print order station; such a solution will be very helpful if you want to start a photo printing business or want to expand the existing one at a low cost. Kiosks do not need much space, has low maintenance fee, and they are available 24/7 for your clients to place orders.
  • instant print station, which allows your clients to get their photos printed almost immediately. This way does not require special photo labs and will be useful, for example, for an Internet cafe, or a small shop looking for additional services to offer to their clients.
  • photo gallery access and order station; here your clients can select photos from your photo gallery and order them to be printed. This approach can be used by nightclubs and theme parks having event photographers, or by photo studios.

Each part of this topic includes general description of an approach, step-by-step kiosk usage algorithm and advice on how to configure Photo Kiosk.

Print Order Station

The best known way to use kiosks is as order-taking stations, which can be placed anywhere to collect orders for your photo lab. Photo Kiosk makes it easy and convenient for your clients to place orders. Let us briefly describe order lifecycle in case of using Photo Kiosk:

  1. A client places an order via Photo Kiosk.
  2. After the order is placed, Photo Kiosk prints receipt.
  3. Photo Kiosk handles the order (in background).
  4. Photo lab gets the order and executes it.
  5. The client collects the order and pays your cashier for that.

Here we suppose that all orders will be completed by the photo lab. Thus, you can offer your clients additional services along with photo prints. There can be some predefined fee applied to orders (e.g., postage services fee) or customer may want to get CD/DVD disk containing photos along with printed copies, etc. For more information about additional services see the Additional Services topic.

The following configuration steps should be performed in order to start collecting orders using Photo Kiosk as print order station:

Order Management

After an order is placed, Photo Kiosk exports it to the chosen format and saves it to the orders storage; this process is run automatically in the background. All orders can be exported to DPOF (format used by minilabs) or to the configurable arbitrary format. You can choose the format, configure it, and specify other settings in Configuration Tool.

For more information see the Orders Management topic.

Using Several Kiosks

If you want to use several kiosks to get orders for your photo lab, it is better to set a network shared folder as a Folder to store orders. That will allow collecting all orders in the same place. Also you should specify unique Photo Kiosk ID for each Photo Kiosk instance to avoid order name conflicts.

Instant Print Station

If you print photos on printers, not minilab, you can find instant print workflow very promising. The main benefits of this approach are that photos are printed right after the order is placed and they are printed automatically. You only need to connect your photo printers to a kiosk (directly or through network), configure them and Photo Kiosk one time and accept payment for each order. Let us briefly describe how it works:

  1. A client places an order via Photo Kiosk.
  2. After the order is placed, Photo Kiosk prints receipt.
  3. The client pays a clerk and gets payment confirmation code.
  4. The client returns to the kiosk, click Process order button and enters the code.
  5. The kiosk releases printing process.

You also can accept post-paid orders; just turn off code confirmation requirement using Configuration Tool.

In case of burning photos to CD or DVD, the workflow is quite the same, but on the last step the kiosk burns CD/DVD. Remember that a kiosk should be equipped with a CD/DVD burner in order to burn CDs/DVDs.

The following steps should be performed in order to configure Photo Kiosk as instant print station:

Photo Gallery Access and Order Station

This approach is especially suitable for nightclubs, theme parks, photo studios, in a word for everyone who makes photos of clients. Your clients will be able to choose and order their photos quick and easy. Here is a brief description of this in action:

  1. Event photographers make photos and upload them to the shared folder.
  2. A client selects photos and makes an order via Photo Kiosk.
  3. After the order is placed, Photo Kiosk prints a receipt.
  4. Photo Kiosk handles the order (in the background).
  5. Photo lab gets the order and executes it.
  6. The client collects the order and pays your cashier for that.

Photo galleries can be really huge, so a good idea would be to work out a system to name folders with self-explaining names. For example, folder namees can contain date when photos were taken. Thus, your clients will be able to choose only from the photos they are interested in.

The following configuration steps should be performed in order to configure Photo Kiosk as photo gallery access and order station:

Note

Do not forget to enable folder selection in Configuration Tool, otherwise, your clients will need to choose from a huge amount of all photos in your gallery.

See Also