Isn’t it a giant pain to sort through all the photos to figure out which ones are yours?
After spending $1-2k on park tickets, Hundreds or thousands on a hotel, plus food and travel expenses, I feel like the $149 (in advance) for MM is just a drop in the bucket. So if you’re paying $34 in a group, you’re saving $115. After the $3-8k you spent on everything else, is that $115 really worth the hassle of sorting through the pics to find which are yours?
Agree 100%.
Not to mention while we want to think that everyone who goes to Disney is good and has good intentions, that is not always the case. With this set-up, you are opening up pics of you and your kids for anyone in that group to do with whatever they want.
For our share, it was really easy to pick out our photos. I sorted by date and then scrolled to our block of pictures. I picked the photos and downloaded. They weren’t really mixed together because no one else was in the same park on the same day.
Totally worth it for us. Easy and worth the savings.
I had no problem picking out our pictures. I think we had 5 in our group.
It was super easy when we did it.
I did a share and it worked great! But our trip cost was a different situation. DH had a conference at CSR, so his airfare, hotel, food were paid for. Only expenses were out tickets (conference rate), my airfare, my food, and $35 MM share. A fairly cheap trip. I had over 300 photos for the two of us in five days (I had way too much fun meeting characters). As others have said, it was easy to find our photos. Narrowing it down by our dates and parks, we were easy to spot.
The numbers are a little different… $169 to purchase MM in advance now and once we broke it up amongst 8 families it was $22 a family. So we saved $147. But still the question stands.
Picking out the pics was actually easy. That took me 30 minutes or an hour while we watched Netflix one night.
The most time consuming thing for me this time was doing all the duties of the organizer: creating the dummy account, making sure that you are connected to everyone in all the parties, and then communicating the details with everyone else.
Also, another downside is that for some reason most of the families connected to the dummy account could not see and download their pictures in real time via the MDE app without a watermark… they had to log in as the dummy account. To me that is really frustrating because it eliminates the ability to smoothly post your Memory Maker pics to your social feeds in real time.
Worth it? Not sure. By the time we dropped $7-8k for our trip, I was actually looking for ways to save $150 here or there… and this was one of those places.
Just my two cents.
For me, it’s about how much I’m willing to pay for the photos. Am I willing to pay $169? No. Am I willing to pay $22 plus a little extra sorting time? Yes.
Yes, I’m spending a lot on the vacation overall, but I still try to view each spending decision independently instead of just, “Oh, why not? We’re already spending a bundle.” If I thought that way, then we’d be spending a bundle and a half before we got out of there.
This, exactly. If every time $150 upcharge pops up you just say "What the heck, you get to $1,000 bucks quick. If that $1,000 doesn’t matter to somebody, more power to them. For me, I’ll save that money for something else.
For me totally! I had no problem finding my photos. I enjoyed seeing photos of others too. It gave me ideas for pics I wanted to take. I would not pay 169. But I also wouldn’t pay yhe going rate for tickets. I am a Fl resident. If not for that we would not go. I think people paying outrageous proces for things and upcharges just encourages Disney to keep uping prices.
I have a budget when I go, so any savings means I can do something more. I haven’t found it difficult to sort our pictures from the rest.
I paid $14, so yes it was way worth it (it was $28 per group and then that was split between myself and my travel buddy). I was the lead, so I wasn’t thrilled about the extra stress, but it wasn’t too bad. We had a pretty good group. I was at the beginning of our window, so I just put the filter oldest to newest knowing my pics would be at the beginning. It cost me about 45-60 minutes extra. I don’t know about you, but I don’t make that much per hour, so yes, it was worth it (If I made that much per hour I would not be concerning myself with such things!). I applied that savings and got two EMMs.
I save $115 by doing the share. I save another $250 by buying Disney gift cards through target. I save another $50 or $60 bucks by declining housekeeping. I got a Disney Visa in order to save another $250 in statement credits. I moved my dates a week in order to go through Magical Vacations Travel and saved another $700. It all adds up. So yeah…it’s worth it.