I remember, being in the back seat with my siblings, mom & dad in front, ( none of us wore seatbelts) in dad's Chevelle...I was excited to see the picture's, but had to wait till mom saw them first...and mom would warn us, "Don't get your fingerprints all over the picture's"...happy memories

Today's digital camera owners will never experience the thrill of getting your pictures & film from a Fotomat. 📷

Man this is emotional stuff,I hate modern times and miss when America was friendly

I very briefly worked at one of these in 1976. I was 16. It was a fun job really. Yes, I used the restroom in a gift shop across the way.

I remember Fotomat when I was a kid. The location was close to home and I would ride my bike to drop off the film.

I was born in 1964 so I remember these in the 70’s. This was when we really only had 110 cameras as they were the most popular and affordable to most Americans. I truly wish we could go back and do it all over again. We had to wait for everything and that made a slower way of life. I just hate what technology has done to us as a whole!. I really believe we lived in the last of the best decades in America during the 70’s and 80’s A note to the owner of this channel ****** It would be great if you did one on the Kodak disc camera and it’s failures due to the processing… And thank you fir this channel, it’s a wonderful thing to look back on and a very positive channel…

As a kid I always figured there were stairs that led to an underground photo lab.

They’ll be making one of these nostalgic pieces about Amazon in the future, where you’d have to wait an entire day for what you impulse-purchased from your smart phone.

Love the piano and the voice it truly takes us back when America was America 🇺🇸

Maybe it's just me, with the advancement in technology to save us time, it seams the time we have passes by so much faster.

Dear Sir, I've just started to watch your website on forgotten places of long ago. It takes me back to a friendlier and a nicer time in our lives. A time when people were nicer to each other and life was normal and peaceful. Thank you for these moments to remember. Mike Bienes

Sometimes we would wait a few weeks before going to Fotomat, then when pictures were ready, I would tear open the little envelope they give you and re-live that great uncle’s birthday party again. Right in the car. Lol

When I was a cop in Phoenix the fotomats got held up alot by dopers who needed just enough money to get their next fix. Fotomat usually had young women working at the formats and they would get scared to death when held up.

Thank you for the trip down memory lane

I still use film cameras. Film is still there and makes a bit of a comeback among the young who like the fact that something in their life isn't digital. Still I miss the amount of available film types.

Had one in the local shopping center until the whole shopping center was torn down and rebuilt. I remember it being open but sat empty for years. Another American icon gone.

And after the closed the were turned into hot dog and food stands, flower stalls and all sorts of "little shops." But they were revolutionary when they opened. Everybody I knew used Photomath.

I came across your channel about a week ago and this is the second or third video I watched. You have very nice content on your channel and you do great work. This brought back some great memories. Thanks

I remember spending several weeks allowance on a roll of film and getting it developed. Man, that was a expensive hobby back then for a teenager.

My mom loved Fotomat. We literally went just about every other week for herself or my aunt. They loved their albums and sent pictures to everyone in the family. They guarded those negatives and albums like hawks. Fun times.

I remember seeing Fotomat shacks everywhere. They were so small, you could fit them in any parking lot.

A relic of the past but it seemed like a good business model for the time.

Gosh I remember when Fotomat's were so common to see, and then in the blink of an eye you realize it's been decades since you've seen one.

Your videos remind me of how rich our life was back then, and how poor in humanity it is today!

The days of physical media. Like everything else... so different from today.

Man! You are doing a great job! Your series should be developed in a documentary for the whole world to enjoy! Keep it up!

Those were the good ole days! Fotomats were everywhere in my hometown!

This goes back to the late 60”s,early 70”s every adult in my family went to the Kodak shack! Seemed they were in every town! By the time I was a young adult, I went there for my photos! I miss those days!✨

I liked Fotomat! I went to one in Farmingdale, N.Y., which I could walk to from my house! I still use a film camera, and sadly must have the pictures sent out of state, from the local CVS Pharmacy. They come back developed, usually within a week. I know what younger people would say, "When are you going to get a digital camera"!!

I loved them. Only remember 1 near me in the 80s. Don't recall it in the late 70s. I remember waiting was hard. Now the young people have instant photos. These were much cooler than a selfie stick in my opinion.

Yes, very emotional. My husband used to drive from one photo barn to the other in town picking up pictures and delivering film from film barn to the other. That was in 1972 and we were very young and just married. I would ride with him a lot of times. He of course moved on to a better Post Office position. But melancholy memories. In Indiana they were called Film Barns.

Who could forget turning in a 36 exposure role of Kodacolor and getting back an envelope of some overexposed, some underexposed and blurred prints.

I was just starting out in my photography hobbie in the 70's,would drop my film off in the morning could pick it up in late afternoon.How convenient was that!

I worked for Fotomat in the Greenville/Spartanbug SC area from 1977-1979. There were about 12 locations in that “district” and over time I worked in all of them. The store hours were 10-7 and stores had two shifts 10-2:30 & 2:30-7:00. I was the only male associate and yep I wore the pale blue polo knit shirt, until the end of 79 when they issued a unisex zip up blue and yellow smock that the girls & guys both wore. Fotomat was always rewarding associates with monetary and products when “up sold “ customers to order double prints or for 35mm customers to order “Pro-Series” developing (larger higher quality prints). It was a great job for after school for me ( I could do my homework between customers). In those days two employees worked in one store, each doing one of the 4.5 hour shifts then we’d alternate Saturday’s and the hours on Sat were 10:00-4:00. Closed on Sunday.

We have photos over 100 years old. Will digital be able to last that long? Technology changes. Negatives can be reprinted from, but a corrupt digital device is just gone.

Imagine sitting in that booth all day in the middle of summer

Miss it

Fotomat was my first job after high school! Lots of good memories. 🙂

Best part of working in one of those booths was looking at everyone's pictures.

Before this, I watched the episode on the old A&P. supermarkets. As a young child, we would go shopping at the A&P then either drop off film or pick up pictures at the photo mat in the same parking lot in Trooper Pa.

Leo: So, do like photos, man? Hyde: Yeah, man! Sure! Leo: OK! You got the job, man!

I still to this day miss photomat

The old Fotomat near me has been a Key cutting place for years now.

I loved my little Kodak 110 camera. I would take the film to the K-Mart Camera Department for developing. I remember calling K-Mart everyday to see if my film was ready to pick up. When they would say yes, it would make me so happy. Of course I was just a kid then,.

I didn’t use them that much but I sure remember them in every shopping strip mall!

Good memories

Good Morning. Another excellent video. I really like these videos, which tell the story, of life in the past, which in my opinion, was better. Congratulations on the channel.

I miss those carefree times. Awesome video!

My late wife worked at a Fotomat in Kansas City Kansas back in the 1970s.

Oh my gosh! I remember these. We would use Fotomat to get our pictures developed.

My mother worked at one of these for a few years. When the photographs were brought to the location prior to them being picked up by the customers, it was part of her job to review them for anything inappropriate. If she found anything that was not proper she was to destroy the photo but not the negative and the people picking them up were not charged for the missing prints. If it was of a criminal nature then she was to call the local police. She told me of some of the things strange and pornographic things that people would photograph. Also they would have to wait for thirty days for people to pickup their prints and negatives before they were thrown out. It got so bad at one point that they started to charge a fee ahead of time just to cover costs. They would sell film as well and some people would want to purchase the expired color film because of the unusual colors and distortions that would show up after it was developed.

There is still one in the parking lot of the old A&P Super Market parking lot in Marlboro NJ. Now a Food Emporium.

Fotomat was great and back in the day I used them a lot but as a lot of great things new technology made the obsolete but I do remember the Fotomates were cute...........

My first job. My dad worked for Fox Photo and I got a job at the kiosk

Yes, I remember those days when you took 24 pictures of your once-in-a-lifetime trip and did not know if any actually were any good until you got back home to have them developed. On one camping trip, I kept the lens cover on a whole roll of film; that kind of disappointment stays with you for a long time. Also today we can take hundreds of pictures, so we take them of anything, but the film was expensive for me, and I remember that all you got were rolls of 12, 24 or if you were lucky the 36 pictures. Then if you took a picture all your friends wanted, you had to pay for duplicates using the negative. Oh, the days of testing your patients.

Being a Fotomate was my first job at 16! I loved it! 1976

I remember that place.

"I can see it all now, it's gonna be just like last summer when you fell in love with the girl at the Fotomat. You bought forty dollars worth of f***ing film and you don't even own a camera. You never even talked to her."

I worked for a fotomat plant in the late 70's. They were in use into the 80's

For many if my childhood years, I thought the amount of space that was needed to develop a picture wasn't very big thanks to them.

Totally agree, now everyone is unhappy and on medication. I grew up in the 60s and ever memory was a happy one.

I anticipated so much waiting to get my film developed at fotomat 🙂 Those were the days...

Love it

My oldest brother used to get family photos developed at these Fotomats.

As a photographer this one really hits home!! Love those old boxes of kodak film, boy do I ever miss that stuff. I have got my old film camera's collecting dust now...

Fotomats were the next best thing to instant photos. My mom always took her film to the drug store because it was cheaper than the Fotomats. Waiting for the photos also made it more exciting when we did finally get to see them.

I didn’t know about the movie rental there, so cool. My buddy worked there, he said you wouldn’t believe the pics people had processed, I guess they thought it was magic lol.

I still have stacks of the envelopes with the photos and negatives in them. The photos are holding up well from the 1970s. It was amazing to get them back so quickly, just drive up to the window to drop off or pick up. I always wondered if they had a toilet there for the customer rep to use.

I was a Fotomac. Fun times sitting there looking through everyone's photos!

I love my AE 1 Canon 35 mm! Still this day I have it on the shelf ready to go🤔😁

Fotomat was the only developer my mom would use. It became the only place that carried film cartridges and flash cubes for her 126 Instamatic. Great memories.

Love their little stores !

I remember taking lunch to my mother who worked at one of the photo kiosk we had in our neighborhood in 1979. Ahh, those were the days..

Back in early 1970's, a friend of mine and his wife obtained a FotoMat franchise. Before long they had the franchise for every FotoMat store within a 65 mile radius. They did QUITE well financially! When FotoMat faded, they bought a Subway regional franchise and did even better! They had an eye for thriving businesses.

Look at all those films behind her!!! Drooool.

Funny seeing Woolworths in the background. Simpler times forever gone.

Great. Thanks. I forgot how they were everywhere like mushrooms. I wonder how many of those booths got hit by cars in parking lots.

I remember these small Foto shops then one hour developing came about and then digital pics came and is still here today

We had one of these in my hometown of Cortland, NY. I believe my parents used them for processing our photos a few times. I think it was closed down sometime in the mid 80s.

Wow! That brought back some memories. There were a number of knock-offs on the Fotomat concept (Fast Photo and Fox Photo come to mind). In 1979, when I was 11 years old and learning the craft of photography, I used to walk one block to a Fast Photo near my home. The pigeonholes full of different film sizes and emulsion types always seemed so full of possibilities. And the idea that I could get my pictures back in one day was absolutely magical. Digital, with its ability to let you check the picture immediately, is obviously better, but there was something so exciting about getting that envelope of prints back from the lady in the kiosk and looking at them right in the parking lot. Sad that those days are gone. Really depressing to see Fotomat kiosks selling cigarettes! Blech!

wow i was 7 years old i saw beautiful lady at 1 these damn memory's. heart has been broken

I miss these places. Some of them in my town ended up as FedEx depots or other non-photo shops.

My mother, and then I normally used local drug stores or camera shops for film developing. I did use a 1 hour drivethru place once when out of town shooting my sister's wedding. I did test shots during the rehearsal and got them developed that evening to adjust settings for the wedding.

Thank you so much for this channel. Wish I could go back in time. You have a very calming voice and love the music in the background.

I loved dropping off film there. I lived in the deep south, poor workers didn't have A/C till the last year. I don't remember movie rentals.

I worked nine years in the main Fotomat lab in the eighties, covered the northeast. We would do 40,000 rolls of film a night on occasion. I remember doing photo inspections, where in four hours you would see a hundred photos shot at Disney, taken from the exact same spot. And for every 10,000 ‘ same old same old’ pic of birthdays or weddings, you would see something that would blow your mind.

If you find an older shopping center that still has one of those structures in place, it's now a cab service stand. Walk up, say you need a cab, where you're going, they'll tell you how much it'll be. Wait next to the structure for a few minutes. Cab will pull up to pick you up. Makes sense when you think about it. What else could they turn those things into? And in an outdoor shopping center, it makes sense. Get dropped off. Do your shopping. Get a ride home.

Thanks for the memories !

Remember those little yellow roofed huts so well. Some of those photo-mates were damn cute.

All the things we take for granted, we never think about how in the future, such things would become obsolete.

This brings back memories!!☺☺

I remember those days too and I miss them

In Nashville, we had Barbara Mandrel one hour photo.

Being from Rochester NY what really hurts is Kodak being gone. At one time 68 thousand people worked here and tens of thousands more worked in companies that were built because of and for Kodak. Every business developed film here

Wonder what business will be relics in twenty years? In 2004, I took a photo of some telephone booths literally put out to pasture in a field.

My first job was working at a little Fotomat kiosk. I was 17 & didn't even have my driver's license yet, so I had to ride my bike to work. I learned a lot: How to operate a cash-register (the old-fashioned, non-digital/electronic kind, which meant I also had to learn to make change in my head), how to fill out the financial stuff on the daily revenues, make the bank-deposits, etc. But more important than anything else, I learned something VERY early on as a result of working there: Just how ill-suited I personally am at dealing with people.

I always used to wonder if Fotomats had a bathroom inside them. You wouldn't think so considering how small they are, but on the other hand, I don't think the owners would like it very much if the worker had to leave to go find a bathroom somewhere else, leaving the Fotomat unattended. I bet I'm the only person in the entire world who wondered about this.

I have a story about Fotomat - it's kinda off-base, but Fotomat will forever be a vivid memory because of it. I was working in construction as a power tool operator. One day, out on Redondo Blvd in Long Beach out in California, my buddy and I needed to turn over a man-hole cover, - out in the middle of an intersection. We put the traffic cones out. I've never seen anything like it - when Dave pulled-up that cover - a literal blanket of thousands of cockroaches pour out onto the street. Well, on one corner there was one of those tiny parking-lots with stores next to each other. Out front was a Fotomat. These enormous winged cockroaches invaded everything around (Dave caught them crawling up his pant-leg, and kept them to feed to his scorpion). There was a girl in the Fotomat, and fortunately I don't think she noticed these trailor-size cockroaches crawling up all-over the side of her little building (Fotomats were tiny-tiny house-like little places). I've never seen bigger cockroaches.

I'm miss that! People had patience then for almost everything. Today everything is instant gratification!! I'm glad I grew up in the 60s and 70s.

The drive through Fotomat in my town is now a drive through coffee place.