Tomorrow at noon Pacific time, Kodak's online Kodak Gallery will go dark. A total of 68 million US and Canadian customers will have their combined collection of 5 billion photos transferred to Shutterfly's site. The shift comes after Kodak filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of this year, later selling its Gallery to Shutterfly for $23.8 million.

The Los Angeles Times spoke to Shutterfly about how the company will handle the transfer, which will increase the number of photos it stores for customers by 50 percent (adding 5 billion photos to the 10 billion photos Shutterfly's customers took 13 years to amass). Although the two companies' data centers are just about a mile apart from each other, the transfer of "multiple petabytes" of data took a team of 25 more than a month to plan.

Shutterfly has already begun moving the data, but the process will take months to complete. In the meantime, users won't have access to their formerly-Kodak moments. The company says users who've ordered products from Kodak recently or who have more active accounts will regain their photos sooner.

"On Monday, Kodak’s facility will be aglow with stack after stack after stack of Shutterfly's signature bright orange, 7-inch, rack-mounted hard drives heating up and humming as the files shoot over into the servers," writes The Los Angeles Times. "These servers, which come in empty except for some proprietary security software to encrypt all the data they gather, will leave brimming with years’ worth of priceless snapshots and irreplaceable moments." The company makes three copies of every file, and began transferring the metadata several weeks ago.

In addition to the transfer, another bit of Kodak news will happen on Monday: Eastman Kodak will learn from a Manhattan bankruptcy judge whether it can set its 1,100 patents up for auction. Together, these are estimated to be worth $2.6 billion.

Kodak has proposed an auction on August 8, but it has not appeared to attract any high-profile bidders yet. This is possibly due to some of the disputes surrounding the ownership of a few key patents. Apple and Kodak in particular have repeatedly butted heads on patent issues, with Kodak recently crying foul against Apple and Flashpoint Technology for trying to "delay and derail" Kodak's patent sale and subsequent restructuring.