Welcome to Town Square Theater, Presented by Nikon, and now almost entirely run by automated PhotoPass cameras.

Much like the popular Darth Vader meet and greet in Star Wars Launch Bay at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, which recently implemented automated cameras, a new automated PhotoPass “photographer” has been installed at the Mickey and Minnie meet and greet in the Magic Kingdom.

Over in Rehearsal Room 4, which is known as Mickey’s dressing room, a set of bookshelves nestled with two stacked, embedded cameras now take the place of actual human PhotoPass photographers.

Character Attendants are still present during your experience as they help guide the meet and greet and direct guests to stare and smile at the PhotoPass box––I mean, bookshelf. If you ask, they can still take photos with your phone, but again, they aren’t trained PhotoPass photographers. (Although, I have had some character attendants take really good photos, too.)

The way it’s built in is rather clever as the cameras are in between the books, but they didn’t really add faux book spines over the camera boxes to mask them too.

As you can see in the photo above, the flash actually comes from one of the book spines.

Mickey and Minnie are in their Celebration garb for just a few more weeks, but it seems these automated PhotoPass boxes are here to stay at meets.

Once finished, you tap your MagicBand, ticket, or scan your Memory Maker card to redeem your photos, which come out all out of frame and timed poorly, due to the automatic timed shutter intervals of the cameras.

Many readers have written in expressing their concerns for the increasing lack of PhotoPass photographers in the parks, especially after the implementation of other PhotoPass boxes at other meet and greet locations like Tinker Bell’s meet and greet in the Town Square Theater. What do you think of these new PhotoPass automated boxes?