How to Explore San Francisco Through Its Photo Booths
It may be 1 p.m. on a weekday, but that doesn’t stop San Francisco’s Photo Booth Museum from being packed.
Friends, couples and families huddle together among this collection of analog vintage photo booths from as early as the 1940s that are installed in the two rooms of this Castro District business.
Using these types of photo booths is a serious business — the pictures take some time to develop without the help of digital sensors or printers, and some groups are discussing their game plan on how to pose before entering the booth, referencing various trends they’ve seen on their feeds online.
“People are willing to wait in line,” said Doug Ellington, co-owner of Photomatica, the photo booth rental and restoration company which runs the museum. “They’re willing to wait five minutes for a picture [to develop], which is kind of insane.”
Many of the booths that were made in the 1950s were advertised as being fast, he said. Their exteriors often even featured atomic symbols and lightning bolts, boasting that you can get your photos in just five minutes.
“Now the kids, they always ask, ‘I think it’s broken, my picture’s not coming out,’ and sure enough, sometimes, it’s just waiting to be developed,” Ellington said.
- Jump straight to: Plan your own photo booth tour of San Francisco
There’s shrieking and giggling as members of one friend group jump in and out of a booth between flashes, so each person can have their personal picture on a black-and-white photostrip.
Some visitors are patiently drying their strips, which come out of the machine a little damp, and some are even using blowdryers provided by the museum to speed up the process.
Chandler Thao and Manreet Randhawa of Sacramento are using their analog booth photo strip to “soft launch” their six-month relationship.
“Photos carry a little bit of each person, is how I see it,” Randhawa said. “It’s a physical way to remember a place, a person, a relationship, a moment.”
During the summer, the Photo Booth Museum is often this crowded, Ellington said — especially thanks to Gen-Z visitors who covet the analog machine’s vintage photostrips that come in black-and-white or color.
“Gen Z specifically takes a lot of pictures, and they’re not really with intent a lot of the time,” Ellington said. “You could take a thousand pictures in a day, literally, and it doesn’t cost you anything, and it just lives on your device.
“But the idea of having a physical strip or a physical image is kind of a novelty for young people,” he said.
A photo booth love story
For Ellington, his love for analog photo booths started with his wife before they got married, 16 years ago.
She had taken him into his first one at vintage clothing store Wasteland in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. “‘These booths are different,’” he recalled her saying. “‘They make you look good.’”
For their wedding celebration, the couple wanted “the photo booth that makes you look like the one in Wasteland,” Ellington said.
But it was being unable to ultimately rent the kind of analog model they wanted that spurred him to build his own photo booth — sparking a lifelong interest for him and his co-founder, Matt Dewalt, who helped him start Photomatica.
Now, Photomatica has photo booth “museums” in several cities across the country, like Los Angeles and Houston. The two and their team have also restored analog booths and built digital booths that can be found across the United States and even in Europe.
“It’s a really fun, wholesome experience,” he said. “You don’t throw away a photo strip, and I’ve been doing this for 16 years now.”
Vintage photo booths now come to them, he said — often from old business owners of amusement parks, bowling alleys and carnivals. One booth even came from an arcade in South Africa.
Ellington said his hope is for San Francisco to eventually emulate a city like Berlin, where there are public photo booths on the streets. “And they’re 3 euros, too, it’s unreal,” he said. “People that travel there know it as a photo booth city.”
Seeking out a place’s photo booth is something that couple Thao and Randhawa said they look forward to when they visit somewhere.
“Every city that we go to, we do have a photo shoot,” Thao said.
Embark on the KQED Photo Booth Tour
While not quite a fully fledged international photo booth city, San Francisco has no shortage of notable booths dotted around the city’s bars, businesses, stores and spaces — and we’ve created (and tested) an itinerary for you to explore many of them. We’ve even thrown in a few fun digital booths along the way.
Your self-guided tour will start in San Francisco’s Mission District, then the Castro, Haight-Ashbury before circling back to Mission for the night, though of course you can pick and choose to create your own itinerary through the city.
Most of these photo booths — many of which accept credit card or tap-to-pay and are around $7 to $8 for one photo strip — are within another business, like a restaurant or bar.
So be sure to check the storefront’s timing to make sure it is open during the hours and days you want to visit.
Start at: Mission Bowling Club
Address: 3176 17th St.
Type of photobooth: Digital
Color or Black/White: Both
If you’re tempted to play a couple of rounds of bowling while you’re here, Mission Bowling Club’s hours can be found online — but heads-up that the cost of a bowling session ranges from $58 to $78.
Food is also available at the bowling alley — and since it’s one of the few restaurants with a photo booth on the list, it could be a good place to get a bite to eat. (But, of course, there are great bites on the way to your next photobooth.)
Afterward, it’s an 11-minute walk to …
Kilowatt Bar
Address: 3160 16th St.
Type of photobooth: Analog
Color or Black/White: Black/White
This will be the first analog photobooth of the trek, located in a firehouse-turned-bar that opened in 1994.
Kilowatt is also a music venue, so along with grabbing a drink, you can also check out its slate of shows on its online calendar.
Next stop is a 13-minute walk to …
Churchill Cocktail Bar
Address: 198 Church St.
Type of photobooth: Digital
Color or Black/White: Both
A swanky bar with cocktails and whiskeys that is “inspired by the legendary Winston Churchill and WWII era accents.” You can check out the menu online.
It is then a 7-minute walk to the …
Photo Booth Museum
Address: 2275 Market St.
Type of photobooth: A collection of analog and vintage photo booths
Color or Black/White: Varies
You’ll find a lot of photo booth varieties and options in this Castro location, as well as opportunities to turn your photostrip into a keychain or buy it a frame for display.
Owner Ellington’s favorite is a sleek mid-century photo booth that is right next to the museum’s front desk.
“The curved old booth is so beautiful,” he said. “I feel like they really cared about how it looks.”
Afterward, it is time to jump on a 17-minute bus ride (the 33 Muni) or take a half-hour-long walk to Haight, where you can visit:
Hamu Studio
Address: 1612 Haight St.
Type of photobooth: A collection of digital photo booths
Color or Black/White: Both
Hamu Studio has several very customizable photo booths, where you can choose from a variety of different types of strips and frames — and even select which take you want printed. Hamu also provides props to use in the photos.
But the real standout is the “high-angle” booth: a giant pink locker that has a camera and screen installed on the upper corner of the ceiling, resulting in photos that give a vague sense of being on an album cover.
Afterward, just a couple of doors down is:
Club Photomatica
Address: 1644 Haight St., located in 710 Collective
Type of photobooth: A collection of analog and vintage photo booths
Color or Black/White: Varies
Cost: Around $7 to $7.50
Consider this to be a mini Photo Booth Museum since it’s also run by Photomatica, and has plenty of analog booths to choose from. Being located in the 710 Collective, a vintage thrift store, also provides an opportunity to browse the cute clothes this Haight business has to offer.
A 4-minute walk away is:
Amoeba Music
Address: 1855 Haight St.
Type of photo booth: Digital
Color or Black/White: Both
This photo booth has the Amoeba Music logo splashed on the background of its pictures.
Afterward, you can browse the many aisles of this sprawling record store that very much feels like a throwback to ’90s San Francisco.
Keep in mind that it’s procedure for an Amoeba employee to ask you to check your bag at the front desk before entering.
For the next stop, catch a Muni bus (the 6 or the 7 east) and travel for around 13 minutes to get to …
Emporium Arcade Bar
Address: 616 Divisadero St
Type of photobooth: Digital
Color or Black/White: Both
This photo booth is inside a massive arcade bar with a ton of games — classic and new — that you can spend a couple of hours on.
Afterward, take a 25-minute bus ride (the 24 Muni) to wind down your night back in the Mission, at …
Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack
Address: 3230 Mission St.
Type of photobooth: Digital
Color or Black/White: Both
Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack is a beloved Italian restaurant where you can stop for dinner. The photo strips in this location also come with a cheetah-patterned background.
Then, a 3-minute walk away is …
El Rio
Address: 3158 Mission St.
Type of photobooth: Digital
Color or Black/White: Color
This booth is located in a staple queer bar in the Mission with a breezy, huge outdoor patio where you can enjoy your drinks.
El Rio also hosts live music as well as karaoke on Thursdays (but this reporter has had rotten luck trying to get in the singing queue at a decent time in the night).
And then, next door, end your night at …
The Knockout
Address: 3223 Mission St.
Type of photobooth: Analog
Color or Black/White: Black/White
Your last stop of the photo booth tour will be The Knockout’s analog booth — one of the few left in the city that Photomatica does not run.
This Mission punk bar also hosts music, drag shows, dance parties and more, and has been open for nearly 20 years.
Honorable San Francisco photo booth mentions
First of all, we’d be remiss not to mention that KQED HQ actually has its own free photo booth situated in our Mission District offices — especially since the resulting photo booth strip includes the KQED logo running at the bottom.
While the building’s doors aren’t generally open to visitors, you can get full access to our photo booth during KQED Live events, which include shows like Matcha Showdown, Mic Check Bay Area and Dating with Dhaya: Summer Lovin’ Edition. (Let the photo booth tour above be your afterparty!)
Some other notable photo booths that unfortunately were not in the path of this tour but are still absolutely worth checking out:
- Musée Mécanique in Fisherman’s Wharf, also a treasure of vintage coin-operated machines and arcade games
- Binge Coffee House on Valencia Street does not have a traditional photo booth, but rather a very cute, free camera and photo printer at the front of the store (customers also like to stick their receipt-like photo strips on the walls of the store)
- Japan Center Malls in Japantown has a collection of customizable digital photo booths on the first floor that are similar in style to the Haight’s Hamu Studio, and there is also a photo booth storefront on the bridge
- Potobox in Stonestown Galleria
- Dreambox Photos in Chinatown, which provides backdrops like a San Francisco cable car
- The Ha-Ra Club in the Tenderloin
- Mother, a queer bar near Valencia Street
- Blooms Saloon in Potrero Hill
Also not quite a photobooth, but still a great experience (and memento): aura photos, which display colors on top of your image to symbolize what you’re feeling at the moment.
This reporter had an aura photo taken of her at the San Francisco Art Book Fair last year by artist Sharon Zheng, who has a browser version of her aura photo reader and also offers pop-up photo sessions with printed photos and a little companion book to describe the meaning of the colors. Color of Our Energy also accepts appointments for aura photos in San Francisco.
Want to hunt for even more photo booths?
This guide is nonexhaustive, and there are plenty of beloved photo booths still left throughout the city — plus many hobbyists, businesses and people in the know dedicated to finding them.
Some great places to start when looking for more photo booths in San Francisco and the wider Bay Area include:
Keep in mind that not all of these websites are super up to date and may include photo booths that have been closed for a while or changed prices. (For example, despite being listed on Booth Beacon, KQED confirmed that clothing store Wasteland in Haight-Ashbury and Black Heart Tattoo on Valencia Street both no longer have a photobooth.) So be sure to give the hosting business a call and see if there is still a machine up and running to avoid disappointment.