Producer’s Note: Not all of these will require eye bleach afterwards but at least half will. You have been warned.

1. Sex, Family, And Christmas Eve

“Family Christmas Eve picture, Christmas Eve picture, sex, sex, sex, family opening Christmas presents.

This happened several times. :/”

—OrionSuperman

2. Amnesiac Burns Couch

“Had a guy drop off a roll of film that he said he found and had no idea what was on it. Developed it and it was almost like a frame-by-frame of a couch in the middle of a junkyard with two guys pouring gasoline on it and lighting it on fire. When he came to pick it up he was baffled, because he was one of the guys in the photo but had no recollection of that day.

There was also the time I developed a roll of an older black male wearing nothing but small lacy women’s panties posing on a hotel bed looking devious. Old white guy came to pick them up.”

—Karismatikally

3. The Handbag…Job

“Back in the early 90s our grocery store developed film. One pic made no sense in the negative, but when printed produced a point of view shot of a guy fucking a handbag. You could see all the miscellaneous purse contents around the cock.”

—hadria

4. Cruise Ship Filth

“Working on a cruise ship, developing crew films. Some guy would get films sent from his wife, we would develop. A few raunchy shots of the missus in various stages of undress.

We assumed tripod and self timer were involved.

But, no. In one set of shots there was a mirror in the background. Their son (maybe around 10-12) was taking the photos!”

—mr_mac_tavish

5. “I Made that!”

“Worked at the national drug store/photo place about 10 years back. Seen it all. The best one BY FAR was grandma and her grandson’s first camera (I’m guessing he was between 5-8 years old). I believe it was disposable, and for sure it also had the ability to do panoramic shots.

This little man took all kinds of pictures, I was really impressed. We’re talking toys, dinner, inside, outside, he’s gonna be a photographer no doubt. He even set up a bunch of the army figurines on the couch and table in a war, and took pictures of the battle in action. Really cool stuff.

Imagine my surprise when I get to one of the panoramic shots… a giant TURD in the toilet… like forreal. Nice long one too, the kind that wouldn’t go down without breaking in half… Best part, the panoramic shots WONT EVEN FIT IN THE ENVELOPE. So now I’m holding this 5×7 envelope with a panoramic shot of HALF A TURD sticking out of it in the claims bin. I figure best thing to do is put the turd picture in the back and reverse the pictures so the backs are facing front.

An hour or so later of course gma returns with her little boy. At the counter I give her the pack and, as they are paying, of course they open the pack to look. She’s looking and being a supportive grandma ‘oo so nice, oooh I like this one you took it?’ and the kid is SO HAPPY. Finally she gets to the panoramic turd (at this point I can barely contain myself…). She looks and goes ‘oh… wow… that’s… you?’ Her little man looks up with the proudest eyes I ever seen a grandson have ever, and says ‘I MADE THAT!’ ‘Yes you did little man, and it was a good one too…’ is what I should have said. Instead I probably said something like ‘That’ll be 9.95, do you have your membership card today?’

I seen a lot of shit at that job. Nasty pics, funny pics, sexy pics, and a BAZZILION pics of the same old boring waterfall down the street from my job. But only ONCE in my life, have I ever seen a panoramic turd, and I will never forget it.”

—laflex

6. The Most Normal People Are The Prisoners

“Use to develop film from a prison. They’d give the inmates disposable cameras for some reason. I think they were instructed to take pictures of their friends so the inmates would reveal who’s in what gang, idk. Any-who, between pictures of dudes making gang signs and posing in groups there would be pictures of finger-paintings, which I thought was kind of sweet.”

—TheMapleMilitia

7. holy matrimony

“I worked on a photo desk in a supermarket for 3 years, the craziest one I ever had was when a guy asked asked to print off his wedding pictures (to a woman) from his phone, didn’t realize he’d selected everything on there to be printed, and ended up with a bunch of printouts of him getting it on with another guy just before the wedding.”

—KroganSushi95

8. it was a disposable camera!

“Not memorable for the photos, but for the whole situation…

A guy comes in saying he wants to pick up his photos, so as usual we take his name and go to the drawer to look for them.

‘Hmm, nothing there by that name’ I say, ‘perhaps another name?’

‘No,’ he says, so I asked when he brought the film in to be developed.

‘It was a disposable camera,’ says the guy. I say, ‘okay, so when did you bring in the camera to be developed?’

‘IT WAS A DISPOSABLE CAMERA,’ he says.

After a bit of tooing and froing, turns out he took the term ‘disposable camera’ literally, so threw it in the bin right after using it. When I asked him how he expected the photos to get to us from the bin, he said ‘I dunno, satellites or something?’

Fuck me. This was 1999. Like a £5 cardboard camera is gonna have satellite communication ffs.”

—onaretrotip

9. Grandma Levitating

“So my Aunt has a picture of her and her kids in front of their farm house. Unfortunately, she accidentally super-imposed the picture of her mother-in-law in her funeral casket so she was hovering in the sky above her grandchildren. My cousin called it ‘Grandma Levitating,’ and my Aunt had it in her house for years.”

—uponroses

10. Corpses

“I had a summer job developing photos (among other tasks) at a major American pharmacy/retail chain about ten years ago. The photo development process itself was fairly uncomplicated, as a machine automated most of the work. I would load the 35mm roll into the compartment, seal it in, select a few settings, and the pictures would pop out in a few minutes.

The store wasn’t usually very busy, so sometimes I’d look through people’s photos. There were the usual assortment of family trips, Bar Mitzvahs, graduations, awkward proto-selfies, photo fuck-ups of people’s feet and blurred walls. But every couple of weeks, I’d load in an inconspicuous roll of film, and out would pop the gore.

Corpses. A torso opened up. A stainless steel tray holding some organs. A crushed skull, orange-pink brain clearly visible. It got to be pretty disturbing. I would just finish putting photos of a kid’s birthday party into an envelope for the customer to pick up, go to the machine to pick up the next batch, and see multiple puncture and slash wounds on a hairy chest. Or the bloated, opened abdominal cavity of an obese woman. A couple of the other staff would always demand to know when the Sick Pics would turn up, so they could have a look, too. We speculated, for fun, that there was a serial killer in town, and that he was brazenly taunting us with his work. Of course, we had the customer’s last name, first initial, and phone number on the packet we’d keep the photos in, ready for them to come and pick it up.

He came in one day to pick up his shots while I was working the photo area. When he told me his last name, he must have noticed that I paused a little longer than normal before retrieving his photos, and he gave me a wry little smile. ‘You’ve seen my work?’ he asked me. I stammered out some kind of affirmative response. His little smile grew a little more. ‘Don’t get any weird ideas, kid. I’m the county coroner.'”

—SentientCouch

11. A Goat’s Head

“I develop film right now. We got my favorite thing recently.

So when you look through a roll, you get some idea of a story. We got one roll recently. Paris vacation, shots of the Eiffel Tower, and so on. Then guy snorting cocaine in his hotel room, then 3 shots later, it’s him in his underwear, in that same hotel room, holding a goat’s head. The flash was on too, so the goat’s eyes are glowing. No context, nothing. I love it.”

—redisforever

11. Random Death

“Never worked with physical film other than to box it up to ship to Fujifilm, but a good part of my job right now is printing people’s photo orders. Most of it is pretty boring and typical…occasional sexy selfies or the guy with the BBW fetish.

And then there was the time a few weeks ago I printed a picture of a guy laying in the middle of the street, head blown off and brains strewn everywhere. The kicker to me was that it was mixed in with other innocent pictures of kids and scenery…and then, suddenly, brains.”

—meltedsnowflake

12. There Was Nothing They Wouldn’t Develop

“I worked at a one hour place that developed film back in the late 90’s. This was pre-digital and we hand-corrected each pic for color and exposure (it’s way less intense than it sounds,) so we saw everything. They also didn’t take out the nudes and ‘refuse to develop’ them, like some places. Common things I saw:

• So many dick pics. Sooooo many. The funniest one was a guy in those smiley face Joe Boxer boxers (black silk with a red face) and his sloppy post-sex half-mast dong as a nose.
• Naked women, flashing boobs, under the table labia shots.
• Sex sex sex

Some of the odder, sad, creepy stuff I saw:

• We had a client who always brought rolls of what looked like mediocre quality nude model pics. Not the girls, but the photographic quality. They were on a basic white background. They were the formulaic poses, and the girls didn’t look particularly stoked to be there. One day, he brings three rolls in and we get to developing. It’s myself and my friend in the shop at the time and I was on the printer. The three rolls were of two women, a bunch of individual pics, and some together. Their demeanor seemed to go downhill as their state of undress increased; smiling to sad to almost blank. I got a bad feeling and showed my friend. She said she’d developed some the others the previous day that looked off too. Luckily he hadn’t picked them up when he dropped these off. The girls looked drugged. We immediately called the cops (it was a one hour job.) Luckily, they got there before he did. Our boss was pissed that we breached client confidentiality. When the article came out three days later that he’d drug girls, photograph them, and then sexually molest them (including some who were 15 and 16,) I felt vindicated. And guilty that I hadn’t paid more attention before.
• A woman would always bring in pics of her terminally ill daughter enjoying life (trips to Disney and other exotic locales, birthday party, half birthday party, etc.) One day, she came in and told us the girl had passed. She hands us two rolls and says these are the last she has of her girl. We were all sad because we’d sort of gotten to know her through her smile in the pictures. Well, the last two rolls were of this girl in her casket, and people from the funeral posing with her. Okay, I get it, some people need to document things to heal. No judgement. When it came time for her to send out thank you cards to people for supporting them, she came in for 200 reprints of a picture of her daughter. Smiling on one of her trips? At the birthday party? With her siblings? Nope. In the casket. It broke my heart.
• County prosecutors office brought in some 120 negatives (medium format film) and they wanted copies of each frame. That has to be done completely by hand, so I got to printing. Most were of a small plane crashed in the woods. I went through the entire pack begging the god of photo and film that the pilot had made it alive. That god was not on my side, because the last six frames were a young woman (about my age at the time) slumped by a tree. She had some blood coming out of her nose and mouth, but otherwise looked like she was sleeping. She had a very passing resemblance to me. But what I noticed the most was her clothes. I kept thinking ‘Did she know this would be her last outfit?’ I hope she was living a dream and it was beautiful before she passed.”

—Special_McSpecialton

13. A Lot Of Flute Playing

“I worked at a mini lab and have seen graphic photos; from car accidents to all kinds of sex acts. It was challenging when customers would ask for re-dos of nasty pics to color-correct for better skin tones. My favorite roll was from a piano company. My coworker pointed out that there were no pianos in the photos, but there sure was a lot of ‘flute playing’.”

—UnPrecidential

14. The Poop Book

“I worked for a company that had a photo printing site that did photo books and gifts. Some of the more memorable photos I recall going through the system:

• A topless elderly woman with her naked boobs resting on the keys of a piano.
• The infamous ‘poop book.’ A client must have had some sort of fecal fetish, as he created a photo book comprised of various images of his poop. The book culminated in a toilet selfie – it looked like the camera was placed inside the toilet bowl, as you could see the rim of the seat and everything, and the guy was standing over the toilet. He ordered about ten copies, too, assumedly for his other fecal fetish friends.

I failed to mention, that he was standing over the bowl completely nude, and you could definitely see his junk.”

—harlemrr

15. A Mother’s Cry For Help

“I worked when they had a bright idea to introduce disposable camcorders. Lots of people made homemade porn videos, almost all of which I did not want to see naked.

One was pictures of bruises all over a child, called a manager who called the cops. Turned out the father was beating the kids and the wife was trying to document but didn’t want to turn the dad in. That wasn’t fun.

Whole bunch of drugs and guns in pictures, intermixed with family photos. Dude worked for homeland security and forgot what he had on the camera.

Developed a couples wedding photos. They put out a bunch of disposable cameras for the guests, multiple dick pics. Then I ran their honeymoon pictures and lots of her naked, A+. They came in to pick up and we’re talking about the resort and said they let peacocks just roam around. Without thinking I said oh yeah saw that looked kind of neat. That’s when they realized that I looked at their pictures (you have to click the button on the machine for each picture), kind of got quiet after that.

Here’s another one, almost forgot this creepy guy.

Creepy guy would ride his bike to the store about two hours before close and spend the entire time on the Kodak machine. He would smile and laugh to himself and end up only printing 2-5 pictures over that time. Dude was late 40ish and hit on the 16 year old girls, so they’d switch with me if I was stocking rather then stand with him.

Any who, he knew the code to the machine and would delete what he was doing when he was done along with immediately putting the pictures in the bag when they printed. My curiosity got the best of me, so I changed the code.

He came in, did his thing and then tried to delete his pictures. Flipped his shit when he couldn’t delete. Yelled screamed, etc. Finally left the store. He was taking pictures of his neighbors through his blinds and then adding bubble captions. I can’t recall the details but it was creepy. Never saw him again after that.”

—off1nthecorner

16. 9/11 Photos A Decade later

“I used to be a tech in a one hour photo lab, back when we still processed the film in the store.

Some years back I had a customer bring in a couple of rolls of film and make me promise to delete them from our machine’s archives when they were done. The images were from Sept. 11, 2001. This guy was there and took pictures of the towers as they burned, but waited nearly a decade to get them developed. So I was the first and likely one of the few people who will ever see those particular photos of that day. True to my word I never shared them with anyone (yes, we do share crazy pictures with our coworkers), but I still remember them.

Makes you wonder how many photos like that exist in the world. Unfortunately he’d waited too long to develop them, so some of the pictures were lost, as negatives are sensitive and can easily be damaged over time due to x-ray, heat, moisture, or light exposure.

Aside from that I didn’t get too many atypical things. A few times a year I’d get to use a posterboard to cover the prints coming out cause of dicks or boobs, our machine was in an area where customers could walk by and see them printing out. Also the occasional accident photos, including some I had to take myself in the parking lot. Nothing exciting, just spots where customers fell.

Oh, there was that one super sleazy guy who used to come in and print photos on the instant kiosks. Most of the pictures he printed were girls of questionable legality, posing but not nude. He claimed to be a photographer, but he was gross and gave off a really creepy vibe. I showed my manager a few of the pictures he happened to leave behind one day and got him banned from our photo lab, but there was nothing else we could do about it.

By and large though, most photos weren’t all that memorable. 99% of people suck at taking pictures. My least favorites were those disposable cameras people would leave on the tables at wedding receptions. Guaranteed I’d spend an entire night developing 30 rolls of absolute shit pictures, so boring. Those and underwater disposables, total waste of money, but at least they were fun to pop open. I used to see how far I could get the little plastic shutter to launch across the lab.”

—Cymas

17. Working With An Absolute Creep

“I worked at a photolab for three years back in the 90’s, and I have some pretty good ones.

Most of the photos that people tried to take that were NSFW were TERRIBLE. They would usually buy one of the crappy disposable cameras, without a flash, and take the pictures in a poorly-lit bedroom where the pictures would come out terribly.

I did have one high-school friend privately ask me to develop photos of her for her boyfriend. They were very tame, but it was weird seeing her with stuffed animals strategically placed over her body.

As you can imagine, whenever there were risque pictures, we all wanted to see, so it was a bit of a sideshow when they came in. It wasn’t often, but it did happen. There were even a couple of times where we had to decide not to print them based on what we saw in the negatives. Nothing creepy, but usually too sexually explicit to develop in our lab. The conversation with the customer was always a bit awkward, but if they had the courage to drop the pictures off, they were usually prepared to get that information in private.

My best story was from about 1996 or so, IIRC. I worked at a photo lab in Fort Worth, TX, very close to the TCU campus and near the Colonial golf course. One day in the spring, a guy came in with about 50 rolls of film and wanted them developed IMMEDIATELY. He wasn’t rude, but he was in a huge hurry. We weren’t cheap, but he didn’t care. Turns out there was a dude named Tiger Woods playing the Colonial golf tournament, and every single picture (36 exposure rolls) was of Tiger. He was getting them developed so he could rush back and sell them. We got the film developed as quickly as possible and back to him, and he was gone. I sincerely regret not making a few extra copies for myself…which would have been against the rules, but I should have done it.

The creepiest thing was finding out that the guy who worked with me was printing doubles of anything that was out of the norm, and had them all in photo albums in his apartment. I was shocked to see that he had about 40 photo albums, full of our customer’s photos in his own private collection. Creeped me out a little, especially since lots of the photos were of the NSFW variety.”

—spoonerstreet23

18. One Random Picture Of The Pentagon

“I grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, and my Mom used to get photos developed at the Wal-Mart or CVS or whatever, nowhere special.

I remember distinctly that a week or two after 9/11, we got a package of our photos returned — interspersed within pictures of my grandparents, brothers, toddler me in my underwear, and other standard fare, there was an eyewitness photograph from the Pentagon immediately after it was hit.

It was like this but from street level and sort of blurry.

I have no idea whether or not my parents still have the photo.

Just one photo, sitting within out normal family stuff. Maybe a great metaphor for the mental impact of 9/11 on the American psyche yadda yadda yadda.”

—TBJSalesman

19. Sketchy AF

“Back in the 80s I worked in a sketchy independent 1 hr photo shop hidden in the back of a small mall. It was a magnet for people to bring in their private photos. SO MUCH FUR. I don’t remember a single day when we didn’t get in a roll of film with genitalia. We were under orders from the boss and manager to immediately make doubles or triples of the good stuff, and there was a lot of that. We had an entire cupboard filled with photo albums of furry people (yay 80s) doing fun stuff.

After awhile you got used to seeing homemade sex and nudity so for the most part it was pretty ordinary. The only times it got odd was when the manager would bring in his own rolls for processing, it was a bit jarring the first few times I printed up pictures of him and his girlfriend, who also worked there, being very kinky in front of the camera (fur and leather). Needless to say I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised when their Christmas party turned into a swingers orgy and I found myself in a pile of 12 naked carolers.

Pay there was crap but the benefits were top notch.”

—ArticArny

20. Old Lady Butts

“Worked at CVS a few years back. We still developed film. Two guys stick out to me. One was this old dude who came in once a month. He would have pictures of old lady butts out in public. Like just random old lady butts in Wal-Mart or the mall. Then he would have pictures of random houses on the same roll of film. It seemed very stalker-ish. Eventually we reported it to the police but I assume nothing came of it because he still came in once a month with the same stuff. I never saw it, but some of the employees who had been there for years said one time he had pictures developed that had cut outs of his dick glued on girls in magazines. He would only ever buy pictures and lube. And never spoke to the cashier. It was understood that he wasn’t going to take part in small talk so we just rang him up then bathed in hand sanitizer.

The other time was these dudes in their mid twenties brought in some film from their vacation. It was full of pictures of weed, coke, cash, and girls with lines of coke on them. I only developed the legal pictures and told them that we didn’t develop pictures of illegal activity. Gave them the negatives and suggested they buy a digital camera or use the iPhone they had in their hands.”

—bryanno4444

21. “Did you like them?”

I haven’t personally experienced anything weird (other than seeing about 1/3 of a dick in one pic), my lab manager has told me though that he’s seen some weird shit in his day.

One time he had a fairly large woman develop some photos, which included shots of her in lingerie. After the photos were developed and handed to her, the woman asks my manager, in a kind of embarrassed voice, ‘did you see any of the photos?’ After saying he did, she leaned in a little close and whispered ‘…did you like them?’

—dandaman64

22. Aliens

“Back in high school I worked at a photo lab. I come in one day, grab a roll, and start doing my thing just like I did every day. The first roll I grabbed had the most convincing UFO pictures I had ever seen and even 2 or 3 with what appeared to be an Alien in a field, again, like nothing I’ve ever seen. No Sci-fi can compete with what I saw in those few pictures.

Not 5 minutes later a man walks in asking for the photos I just developed. I hand them to him and he leans in real serious and asks me, ‘Did ya look at em?’ I jokingly said, ‘Sir, I don’t have time to look at half the pictures we develop.’ Then he paid me and left.”

—9soft

23. A Very Nasty Old Lady

“We would have the 70-something year old lady come in around once a month to develop her pictures. Every time it was the same thing, haunts me to this day. It was her in a see through, pink silk robe with pinks fuzzy bits around the edges, masturbating her two corgis. Just picture after picture of the three of them. The most disturbing was her sticking her tongue out and mock licking the ‘lipstick.’

We reported her for animal abuse but nothing came of it. Instead, each time we would have to refuse her photos because it was against policy to print said photos and she would blush, grin, and simply ask “So you looked at them did you?”

24. Scat

“I worked in a film lab for all of 2 months. The weirdest roll I ever got was of this old couple’s poop fetish. The husband took close up pictures of his wife crapping on the lawn to the point you could see is coming out of her and what she had for dinner the night before (it was corn).”

—kinipayla

25. “Blown” Away By What He FOund

“I have an old college buddy several states away that used to work for Walmart and develop pictures there. He told me of two stories.

The first being about a guy that had a roll developed when he visited the Sturgis Motorcycle rally. Going through and there’s typical stuff: bikes, chicks, bars. Then all of a sudden the rest of the roll is just this dude (the camera’s owner) blowing an entire biker gang. Apparently one of the bikers picked up the camera and started taking photos.

The second was a women who was developing pictures of me. Remember, this is states away, so my friend, upon recognizing me in the pictures, got worried. All these shots of me just standing around talking. He finally mustered up the courage to ask her about the photos, and she told him about a great tour she had in the Black Hills and her lovely tour guide (which was me). He was less worried after that. I was pretty blown away by the coincidence, however.”

—DeathFrisbee2000

26. Misses It Sometimes

“Worked at Fry’s electronics many years ago and people would bring in their busted laptops or broken external hard drives and want us to do data recovery. As you can imagine I saw a lot, I mean A LOT of naked pictures of mostly attractive people but sometimes not so attractive people. There are 3 situations that stick out.

• A father and son come in with a busted laptop and say the data on it must be recovered due to an upcoming court case. The son had been having a sexual relationship with his teacher and had managed to take photographs and video and needed them as proof for the court case.
• A very attractive blonde comes in and says she needs the data recovered from her corrupted laptop due to it being important and business related. Turns out she started a porn site that was people with lactation fetishes. It was hundreds of photos and videos of her squeezing milk from her breasts.
• An attractive Latina Cougar came in and said she needed the data recovered from a hard drive she had dropped because it was work related. Turns out her work was an amateur milf porn star. It was hundreds of photos and raw video footage that was used on “my friend’s hot mom” and things like that.

I miss that job sometimes.”

—Maysba

27. An URs Festival

“I used to work at a CVS and once developed photos for somebody. They started out normal… looked like vacation pictures from India.

A few more photos in and it looked like they were at a gathering of some kind with the native peoples. Then the pictures quickly switched to NSFW, several people were stabbing themselves and others with sharp objects. One picture in particular I remember was of a man with a sword/dagger buried half way into his gut.

I developed the photos and tried to forget about it.”

—Braekdown

28. Almost Terrible

“I used to work at a Walgreens in the photo lab and was standing there watching a stack of photos print off. They appeared to be of an Easter party for some young children at first, then it went to all the children sitting at a dining room table with their Easter baskets in front of them.

First picture, they looked happy.

Second, they were frowning.

Third, downright crying.

By the fourth or fifth it became apparent what their issue was: there was a giant stem of broccoli in each of their baskets.”

—closetsquirrel

29. Cops Give Mom PTSD