Lifetouch

Overview

Lifetouch is a photography studio which specializes in personal and family photographs as well as events. They also provide school portrait services.

Reviews

The Hypertwins

2009-05-21 The sample photos from the school had a URL – photogifts.lifetouch.com &ndash along with a "Portrait ID" and an "Access Code", but when you go to the site you have to either log in or create an account before you can see them. We tried to use the account we created last year (October 2008 -- barely 8 months ago), but the site didn't recognize it.

We then went to the main site], in case the two areas were on different servers and didn't share the same customer database. There is no log-in on the main page. "Pay for school pictures" took us to a page which said that the site will be "open for guests on July 1, 2009". "Order portrait products" took us to a page with a log-in form, but again it did not recognize the account we had created last year.

The extensive use of Adobe Flash on their web site is very annoying.

copyright

As a more general criticism, we do not like their policy of claiming ownership of the portrait images. We do not pay them to create something which we then cannot copy; we pay them to create the image (work-for-hire) and to print it using high-quality reproduction techniques (optical or digital doesn't matter, as long as it's optical-quality) on high-quality photo paper.

This policy is especially bad since there is usually a very short time-limit for ordering more prints (June 30, in the above case). After that, the portraits are apparently in a legal limbo.

Schools should decline to do business with studios which require this policy.