Anyone remember this? Old-school photo processing: private photos on display to public

I have memories, as a kid, of walking past a film-processing storefront at a shopping mall and seeing photo prints on display on a conveyor belt behind a window as they came out of, presumably, the photo processing machine. This would have been in the mid-80s, and it struck me as strange at the time, as a little kid, that the store would be publicly displaying private photos, and it’s still quite bizarre to me now. I want to say it was Woolworth’s or a pharmacy chain or something like that, but I’m just WAG-ing.

Anyways, were these really people’s private photos, or were they just generic photos for advertising purposes?

Am I imagining this, or does anyone else remember this practice or something like it?

I remember that. I thought it was just how they developed pictures at those places, no?