Best Overall Credit: Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar Shutterfly Best Overall Shutterfly offers a huge variety of print and gift options, its prices are reasonable, and its photo quality is excellent, catapulting this online photo printing service leaps and bounds ahead of all the other services we tested. Across the board, Shutterfly sent back brighter, lighter […] Best Overall Credit: Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar Shutterfly Best Overall Shutterfly offers a huge variety of
Credit: Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
Shutterfly offers a huge variety of print and gift options, its prices are reasonable, and its photo quality is excellent, catapulting this online photo printing service leaps and bounds ahead of all the other services we tested.
Across the board, Shutterfly sent back brighter, lighter prints, which meant tiny details were visible, even in the small wallet-size images. Those details were lost in all the other services’ prints we tested.
Great quality was the uniting thread across all the Shutterfly products we ordered: wallets, 4x6s, 8x10s, a photo book, and a 20×30 poster. The poster was also packaged really well and arrived in perfect shape.
But of course the Shutterfly product lineup is much more extensive than just prints and photo books. It offers a huge variety of customizable holiday cards, invitations, calendars, home decor, and even specialty items for kids and pets. That’s right, you can finally order your dog that custom T-shirt.
And if you’re looking for a great photo book, you can design your own from its many styles and sizes, or for $9.99 there’s a “Make My Book” service. Make My Book allows you to hire a Shutterfly designer to take your photos and turn them into a beautiful book within three business days. You receive the final design, add any finishing touches, and pay for the book only if you decide to order the finished product.
We were impressed with Shutterfly. It delivers awesome prints and photo products, and it has a great website and app. But if you’re willing to sacrifice a little (not much) quality and a lot of photo product options, you can save money with our budget pick: Amazon Prints.
4×6—$0.11
Holiday cards, announcements, invitations—$0.94 each, minimum 12
20×30 poster—$16.09
8×8 hardcover photo book—$15
Credit: Reviewed / Sarah Kovac
The Amazon Prints offerings are pretty basic, but the photo quality is respectable, the price is reasonable, and prints can be mailed to you for free. The Amazon Photos app can automatically back up photos from your phone or tablet’s camera roll for easy ordering later (and a little peace of mind that your memories are stored in the cloud). Amazon also provides unlimited photo storage space for free with a Prime membership.
Since Amazon Prints doesn’t offer wallet-size images, we couldn’t compare the quality of these smaller photos to that of the other services. But if you’re looking for standard sizes and good-looking prints at a decent price, Amazon is a good choice. It also offers a basic selection of other services including photo books, invitations, enlargements, holiday cards, calendars, and announcements.
If you’re looking for more options when it comes to photo products, our top pick, Shutterfly, is a better bet.
4×6—$0.09
Holiday cards, announcements, invitations—$0.75 each, minimum 25
20×30 poster—$16.99
8×8 hardcover photo book – $17.99
Hi, I’m Sarah Kovac. After many, many years of spending way too much money and emotional energy trying to find my loved ones the perfect gift, I’ve come to the conclusion that photo gifts are really the only surefire way of getting somebody a present that will be extra special.
I have three kids, and I know that if I’m drawing a blank on a gift for the grandparents, there are few presents that will bring them more joy than seeing the smiling faces of their kids and grandkids—be they on a coffee mug, a blanket, or a framed print for the office.
Over the years, I have reviewed hundreds of products, websites, and even software. I’ve been trained in design, and I have a deep appreciation for intuitive layouts that give me a lot of options without overwhelming me.
While I can speak to the typical user’s experience with these online photo service sites, I am not a professional photographer with deep understanding of makes a perfect quality print. Luckily, Reviewed’s resident photographer, Jackson Ruckar, was available to lend his professional critique of the photos we received from each of these services.
When Ruckar first picked up a camera 15 years ago he became an addict. Since then he has worked as a photojournalist for the U. S. Army, various magazines, and now USA Today. When reviewing photo-printing services, he focused on color accuracy and print defects.
We selected 10 of the most popular online photo services and ordered a variety of products from each: 8x10s, 4x6s, and wallets. Two of the photos we used were taken on an iPhone SE, two were taken on an iPhone X, and two were taken by our professional photographer on a DSLR camera. One photo from each camera was in black and white, and one was full color so that we could see how each service handled both color and grayscale.
Without consulting each other, Jackson and I judged each photo for its quality in comparison to the original, and for consistency from one photo to the next (we ordered duplicates in order to compare them to each other).
I spent time on each service’s website and app (if applicable) on both iOS and Android to judge ease of use and see what special features each service might offer. After these considerations, we narrowed our picks down to the top five performers in reprint quality and ease of use.
From those services, we ordered 20×30 enlargements and photo books to get an idea of how well they handled these special orders.
Credit: Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
If you are shopping print services to order custom holiday cards or announcements, all of the services we tested can accommodate your order. They all offer similar photo card templates, and you can pretty much design the exact same card at any of these websites. However, there are a couple things to consider when ordering your photo cards.
Most of these services require a minimum order of 20 to 25 cards. So, if your list of recipients is on the small side, use a service that doesn’t have minimum ordering requirements. Of the 10 services we tested, only Walmart Photo, Nations Photo Lab, AdoramaPix, and RitzPix don’t have minimum order requirements for photo cards and invitations.
On a related note, most services advertise their custom cards with an “as low as…” price. That price assumes that you will be ordering a huge quantity of cards. The likelihood is that your actual price per card will be considerably higher than the one they advertise. Unless you’re ordering 3,000 cards. But who does that?
Many of the test prints we received back from these services really struggled with print quality when it came to small format black and white photos. Black and white holiday photos can look super classy, but if you pick the wrong photo service, your black and white holiday cards may look washed out or too dark to see details. Our top pick, Shutterfly, handled small black and white prints really well. Most of the others we would not recommend for black and white photo cards.
Our testing showed very clearly that the same image with the same photo service can yield drastically different print results from one size to the next. If you are only interested in printing 4x6s and 5x7s, probably just about any photo service can get you decent prints. But once you start moving toward less common print sizes, print quality can suffer. Be especially careful if you are ordering wallets, as only a couple of the services we tested gave us wallet-size images that weren’t too dark or washed out.
The services we tested were pretty hit and miss in producing high quality black and white prints. And the ones that didn’t turn out great lost a lot of detail if the print was too dark or too light. Unless you order your same black and white photo from several photo services, it’s difficult to know who’s going to give you a good black and white print and who’s not. Luckily, we did that research for you.
So often, saving money means receiving a lower quality product. In our testing, we found this is not the case with photo printing services. Some of our most affordable services sent us back the highest quality photos (for example, we saw the best reprints from Shutterfly, Walmart, and Amazon). There’s no need to pay top dollar for photo prints. If you do, you might be disappointed with the results.
Some of the photo services we tested sent us back reprints that were a bit lackluster. This was most obvious in the photos that were taken by an iPhone SE. The quality of these images was just not the same caliber as those taken by the iPhone X or the DSLR camera. If your image is not great to start with, expect your reprints to be just as bad or worse. Even the best photo service can’t make up for a bad image.
Some photo printing service websites are way too complex for those of us who aren’t professional photographers. As we were testing, it was easy to tell that some of these services are intended for professional photographers, while some are designed for the consumer just looking for a cute Christmas present or birth announcement. Our Best Overall winner, Shutterfly, is easy to use and offers enough variety for the shopping needs of the average consumer while delivering high-quality prints that professionals would appreciate.
That being said, services like Nations Photo Lab, MPix and RitzPix offer a few extra features that photographers might find helpful. Drop shipping, custom framing options, and extremely secure packaging might not be necessary for the average consumer, but certainly worth considering for a client.
Credit: Walmart
Walmart is known for its product variety and reasonable prices, so it’s no surprise that Walmart’s photo service offers both of those things. Many of the photo products are available for pick up the same day or one hour, and all orders over $25 receive free shipping. Walmart photo offers metallic easels, wall tapestries, Christmas cards, plates, jewelry, invitations, phone cases—you get it. It’s a decent variety.
We were happy with the prints we received. As with most of the other services, the wallets were a bit darker than necessary, but not to the extent that the average buyer would notice. Via the Services menu in the Walmart app, select Photo Prints and you can import photos from your camera roll, Facebook, or Instagram to order prints for pickup or home delivery.
