Pixels to atoms
I used to own a 1-hour photo lab. Ran Kodak kiosks for years. Watched thousands of people print their photos.
Here’s what I learned: people need to hold their memories.
Smartphones killed the photo printing industry. Everyone said so. And yet, the kiosks kept making money. Teenagers, young couples, grandparents—they all came back. Not because they had to. Because digital photos don’t feel real.
A photo on your phone exists in an endless scroll. You’ll never see it again. A printed photo sits on a shelf, goes in a wallet, gets framed on a wall. It has weight. It exists.
I watched people’s faces when the print came out. The anticipation. The moment they held it. Something shifted. A file became an object. A memory became real.
The kiosk itself was a lesson in design. Incredibly complex inside—image processing, color correction, paper handling, printer calibration. But the interface? Four buttons. Anyone could use it. Complexity hidden, simplicity exposed. I think about this constantly when building software.
The best part was watching who came in. Not just older people printing family photos. Teenagers making collages for friends. Young adults printing photos for their apartments. People who grew up entirely digital, choosing to make something physical.
We’re told everything is going digital. But humans are physical. We want to touch things. We want objects that last longer than a battery charge.
Photo kiosks are still everywhere. Supermarkets, pharmacies, malls. They survived the smartphone. They’ll survive whatever comes next.
Pixels are convenient. Atoms are permanent.