Film developing used to be so simple. You took your pictures until you used up your roll of film, then dropped off the film at your local photo development center. 1 hour photos would get you your pictures back within an hour while you went around and did your shopping or whatever other errands you needed to run.

The world of digital cameras means that you no longer have to take your rolls of film to the photo lab. But wait, how are you going to turn your digital photos into a picture that you can put on your desk or give to your friends? This is where online photo developing comes into play.

Online photo developing companies provide digital photo developing services. Through this online services you upload your digital images, either taken directly from your camera or stored on your computer, to the developing company. Some of these companies will create a digital photo gallery for you, so that you can take a look at all of the photos you have uploaded.

You decide which pictures you want to have developed and at what sizes you want them to be developed at. The company then prints out the photos on high quality glossy paper for those glossy photograph prints you expect to see in a traditional camera. Once the prints have been developed and made they are sent back to you through the mail. You yourself, though, never even have to leave your house!

Online photo developing is not the only service these companies provide. Many of them other provide other digital photo services, such as red-eye removal. Red eyes, unfortunately, are one of the problems that remains even in the world of digital cameras. Through their photo processing technology, online photo developing services can often remove these and other errors from your pictures.

In order to utilize online photo developing services you are first going to need a digital camera. These are all the rage these days (in fact it is growing harder and harder to find non-digital cameras in popular stores). Once you have your digital camera you will take pictures with it just like normal. Depending on the type of digital camera and the amount of memory it holds you can take many more pictures than you would be able to take with a normal roll of film.

Once the pictures have been taken, you will need to connect the camera to your computer. This is often done with a simple USB cable. You plug one end of the cable into your camera and the other end into a USB port on your computer. The camera then works as a sort of removable disk drive, you open up the camera just like you would any other drive and then send them to the hard drive on your computer.

If you are uploading your pictures for online photo developing, you don’t even need to put the pictures onto your PC's hard drive. You can upload, at least in most cases, straight from the camera itself. This saves a lot of time and trouble.