I am a photo lab tech at a massive, insanely busy locally owned camera store and boy, have I seen some things. AMA.

What is the most disturbing picture you have seen come through your store

(Sorry. Copy-pasting from a similar question. I just want to make sure you get an alert to see the response. :) )

Oh God, I feel like this is going to fall under 'well, that escalated quickly'. We do a lot of print work for organizations like Child Protective Services, Family Protective services, etc. The order always comes in digitally (the files are uploaded into our database and we receive a printout that states how many to print of which ones in which sizes) The unfortunate thing, though, is that when we print these images and queue them up to our huge printer, we have to look through each and every digital copy to make sure nothing vital is cropped out. A majority of these pictures are for court cases about child and elderly abuse. We've also received images of violent crimes to print for law enforcement, one of which involved an attempted strangulation (you could see bruises in the shape of fingers on a woman's throat). Also, I have received one order that I suppose was for insurance purposes. Most of these pictures were of a horribly mangled, totaled car. However, towards the end there were several pictures of the victim, whose arm had somehow been severed in the wreck. It was so unexpected after staring at like 50 pictures of the same mangled car. I had to take a 20 minute break after that. I thought these kind of pictures would be printed in house at the bureau that needs them (like, I always assumed CPS printed at their office, I guess), but no. A lot of places order out for stores like us to make sure the prints come out well.

I used to work as a lab tech too. What kind of printer do you use? Its seems odd that you would use a printer instead of a developing machine as surely ink costs more than the development chemicals. Or maybe its the price of the paper? Hmmm.

I would say film developing and printing is only about 20% of what we do in the lab. Everything is mostly digital printing nowadays. People will upload their images to our website or come in with an SD card and order prints on our kiosks. I think because we do so much digital printing already, it would probably not end up being very cost-effective investment.

Also we have 5 massive epson printers. The one I use the most is in the front sales area behind the counter. I hate that fucking printer. I don't think I ever have or ever will hate anything as much as I hate that printer. It's moody, bitchy, and likes to act up when we're swamped with work orders. My coworkers and I joke that we need to hold some kind of exorcism. Another joke we throw around about it is that if that M. Night Shaymalan movie about the devil in the elevator had been about our printer, it would have gotten rave reviews and kicked all sorts of ticket sales ratings in the balls.

What kind of things?

Insanity.

How do you all stay open with so many people using digital cameras these days?

A lot of people don't have printers that are good enough to print photos, so they order from us so they can have hard copies.

I was very surprised by the fact that the lab at my job is as busy as it is. I made the same assumption as you.

What do you do if you find something sinister?

If something I see bothers me, I just report it to my manager. Some stuff we work with is by definition sinister. We work a lot with bureaus like CPS.

I've got several rolls of film from garage sale cameras - I have no idea what's on them but I'd like to have them developed. How long can an exposed roll of film last before being developed?

It really depends on where you live, how old the film is, and how they have been stored all these years. Do you know any of those details?