Every Pokémon Snap course ends at Professor Oak’s lab, where you manage your photos. Three spaces work together there: the Pokémon Report, which is the official collection, the album, which is your personal collection, and the gallery, accessible from the title screen, which showcases your four best pictures. This page explains what each space contains, how to file your photos in it and how to keep them. The menu names are those of the French version of the game.
Film and saving
A roll of film lets you take 60 photos per course. When you reach the end, or leave the course, you move on to the photo viewing screen, where you sort, mark and present your shots. The photos you keep are not stored on a separate memory card: they are saved on the cartridge itself (the “Game Pak”). The manual stresses one point: return to the lab and choose Save before turning off the console, otherwise you risk losing important photos. Choosing New Game at startup erases all photos.
The first time you start the game, it asks you to enter your name to create your Pokémon photographer card. Without this card, the manual explains, you will not be admitted to Pokémon Island.
The Pokémon Report
The Pokémon Report is the professor’s big book. Each page is devoted to one species and contains the best photo you have handed in for it, the course where it was taken, the photographer’s name and the score given by Oak. Eventually, it gathers all 63 species of the island. The manual lists four ways to browse it: by number (the order of the Kanto Pokédex), alphabetically, by course or by score.
- One photo per species. If you present a new shot of a species already recorded, Oak compares the two and keeps the better one.
- The Best Shot. A special page displays, in a wooden frame, the photo that earned you the most points. It also appears in the main Report.
- The Pokémon Signs. The six signs are included in the Report. For each sign, Oak explains why he named it that way.
The manual suggests challenging a friend: each photograph the same Pokémon on your own and see who gets the best score. It proposes starting with the Pidgey that appear at the beginning of the Beach, which makes a good opening test.
The Pokémon Album
The album is the photographer’s personal space, with no scoring. To put a photo in it, use the Album Mark command on the viewing screen. You can keep up to 60 photos in it, including pictures without any Pokémon. This is where the shots you like go even if they don’t earn many points, or the second-best photos of a species that the Report no longer accepts. The Report keeps only one photo per species; the album has no such limit.
Once in the album, each photo can be handled with the manual’s commands:
| Command | Effect |
|---|---|
| Enlarge | Displays the photo full size |
| Sort | Arranges the photos in the order of your choice |
| Erase | Deletes the photo. Careful: an erased photo can’t be recovered |
| View | Displays information about the photo |
| Comment | Adds a comment, such as the photographer’s name or the date |
With comments, the manual even suggests making a comic strip out of your photos.
The gallery
Once you have saved a good number of photos, you can showcase the ones you’re proudest of in the gallery. You reach it from the title screen: you place your four best photos in it, taken from the Report or the album, so you can show them to friends. Two conditions: the gallery is only accessible after at least four photos have been recorded in the Report, and you must remember to choose Save at the end of the setup.
Printing and sharing your photos
When the game was released, the photos on the cartridge could be printed as stickers at kiosks installed in certain stores in Japan, the United States and Australia. That story is told on the page about the Pokémon Snap Station kiosks. According to Serebii, it was the photos you had saved in the gallery that were printed.
The Wii Virtual Console version replaces this feature: in the gallery, the Select button sends the photo to the Wii Message Board, from where you could save it to an SD card or, as long as the service existed, send it to your friends via WiiConnect24, which shut down on June 28, 2013. The Wii U version doesn’t have this feature: it does, however, let you post game screenshots to the Miiverse social network. Our page on ways to play it today reviews the three re-releases.
Our filing method
- During the course, take lots of photos of each scene: the film roll is generous.
- At the end, go through all the shiny photos (never examined), then mark the best one of each species for Oak.
- Mark the ones you like for the album, even if they score poorly.
- Go back to the lab and choose Save before turning off the console.
- When you have some great shots, put together your four-photo gallery.
