This happens because the shape of the digital camera's sensor is not the same shape as standard photo developing shops' machines. The camera has a shape of 9.7 x 6.5 (that's a rough guesstimate) so when you translate this into what shops normally print the shapes are not congruent therefor they need to crop the photo to make it fit on the paper.
Some self service printing machines will allow you to chose where the crop goes, but if you just dump all your images off your card onto the shops machine and come back to get them later someone in the shop, or more likely, the machine will decide where the crop goes. Either way this will not be a particulary well thought out process and you'll never get what you really want.
Try editing your photos on your own PC/Mac first and crop them to a compatible size i.e 6 x 4, 7 x 5, 12 x 8, etc. that way you decide what gets cropped out of the photo. Or, use an online printing service or a high street printers who allow you to decide what appears on your photos and, more importantly, the proportions of each print, probably more expensive but at least you get what you want. There are plenty about.
Lastly why not get a decent photo quality printer, a paper cutter (guillotine) and print your own, it doesn't take too much setting up to get excellent results and it's certainly not as expenive as it used to be.
Good luck
Foggy
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