So, Future Shop and Best Buy in Canada have outsourced their digital photo processing to Kodak Gallery (which itself was formerly Ofoto).
It was time for me to develop some vacation photos.
I wasn’t about to upload 200 images one at a time, so I tried their “Kodak Gallery Upload Software”. I try to avoid installing custom software for menial jobs like this, but it’s unavoidable this time. Some competing services have nice Java based bulk uploaders, I think Future Photo was one of them… but that’s not the point of this post.
After the quick install of “setup.exe” (why couldn’t they customize the name just a little?), I tried to login. And I and got an error: “Internet connection failed”.
A few searches of the web, and a few retries, I was still out of luck. By fluke, I opened Internet Explorer, and noticed that it had been left in offline mode for some reason. I use Firefox 95% of the time, except when testing web sites, and IE only websites.
Fixing IE to be “online” then trying the Kodak upload software again worked on the first try. My theory is that Kodak either reads some IE settings, or uses the IE engine in the background. So, Kodak, kudos for trying, but you have some work to do on presenting useful error messages or documentation on the web.
Now all I have to do is be patient while the software spends the next few hours uploading my pictures…