Smile, You’re On The Internet!

If you’re tired of all those family photo albums gathering dust on your shelf, you might like this: You can now mail a roll of film to a Seattle company, then download your pictures off the Internet.

No fingerprints on pictures. No dust on albums. Not even a floppy disk to insert into your computer.

Seattle FilmWorks, a mail-order film-processing company, has been selling photos on disk for the past 18 months. Now, if you want, the company will skip the time-consuming step of mailing you the disk: Just call up the company’s World Wide Web page on the global Internet computer network, and you can create your own cyber-album.

The service, called PhotoMail, costs $3.95 for a 24-exposure roll of film, and the process is secured so only you can download your pictures. Software for viewing the pictures is provided free via the company’s Web page: http://www.filmworks.com

Gary Christophersen, president and chief executive of FilmWorks, said the Internet is “the ideal vehicle for delivery of photos to our customers who order pictures on disk.”