Traditional Photo Prints from Snapfish

I don’t often print my photos. More often than not I post them to online hosting sites, like Flickr, to share them. After accumulating several year’s worth of shots from various trips, I decide some are worth hanging around the house. Snapfish’s pricing of $0.09 cents for 4x6 prints is competitive and attactive, but I don’t have a need for this size. I am interested in ordering 8x10 prints at a minimum. One of the shots is of hot air balloons from the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta that screams for a poster-sized print.

Comcast subscribers receive a free Snapfish account as part of the service. I opt to take them up on the offer. I already have my choice images uploaded to Flickr and see that Snapfish can import them. It saves me the trouble of having to find them and upload again. So far so good.

I order ten 8x10 prints. Since I’m often on the road I’m not concerned about the arrival time. They are in my mailbox by the time I return home from a business trip a week later. The details are, indeed, sharp but I feel the colors are not quite as vibrant as I expect. It could be my monitor calibration or my Adobe CS4 color profile. I want to compare the print quality to at least one other service before settling on one, so I sent the same unmodified images to another service and am satisfied with the results. The differences in color are subtle. Like the editor's review before me, I also had issues with the paper quality. It’s worth noting that Snapfish charges $2.99/8x10 while other services charge less (e.g. White House Custom Color $2.20 for glossy, Smug Mug $1.99 for glossy). I pay less for what I consider better quality 8x10 prints.

Since Snapfish is limited to 8x10 prints I look elsewhere for printing the hot air balloon shot. I suspect the limitation is a side effect of their partnerships with Duane Reade, Walgreens, Walmart and meijer. To the best of my knowledge, the largest size these retailers produce is 8x10. Snapfish offers a one-hour optional pick up service. You can upload the photos to Snapfish and arrange for a one-hour pick up at any one of these retailers in your area. I had a bad experience printing several vacation shots at a retail service several years ago. A few weeks later I return to the store and find a binder of sample shots on display at the counter. Several of my images are included without my permission or authorization. I inform the manager and educate him about copyright laws. The clerk who assembled the binder, I’m sure, was well-meaning but uneducated about copyright and fair use and I suspect this problem is not limited to just the retailer I used. Having been burned, I swore off all store-based photo print services.

While Snapfish doesn’t suit my printing needs, it does fit a niche hosting need. I have a HP Dreamscreen and use it as a digital frame. It has applications for displaying images from both your home PC and from Snapfish. The interface to display from Snapfish is a bit easier to use and so will continue to use Snapfish only for this purpose. If you have a need to print 4x6 images, Snapfish is the way to go.

Pros:
- Integration with other services (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, HP Dreamscreen)
- Inexpensive 4x6 prints
- Retailer pick up options (retailer quality is another topic)
Cons:
- Limited to 8x10 (this one is a deal-breaker for me)
- 8x10 pricing is not competitive