Like A., I found the dreaded WIC rearing its ugly head for one last hurrah right before the holidays. Why? Because every family member on our Christmas list was going to receive wedding-related photos or albums for the holidays.
We used three printing services for our wedding pictures: Snapfish, Shutterfly, and iPhoto. We were happy with two, and very unhappy with a third. So if anyone out there is looking to print some photos, here were my impressions of these three services!
Snapfish
Products ordered: Prints (8×10, 5×7, 4×6)
Overall, Snapfish was a great value ($3 per 8×10 isn’t bad!) and their photos were generally high-quality. A couple of our family 8x10s appeared washed-out, but other 8x10s were gorgeous, with perfect color balance. I didn’t love Snapfish’s online interface, unfortunately — it took me a ridiculously long time to figure out how to add a photo to my cart (just clicking the orange “+” sign by each photo doesn’t do the job!). Despite a few snafus, I’d recommend Snapfish without hesitation.
Grade: B+
Shutterfly
Products ordered: Prints (8×10, 5×7, 4×6)
Even though Econo Man and I were happy with Snapfish, I decided to give Shutterfly a try to see if their slightly higher prices yielded superior results.
They didn’t. In fact, just the opposite. The Shutterfly prints were extremely dark, and the 8×10 prints were downright awful — faces were blurry, colors were oversaturated, and Econo Man accurately described one photo of our extended families as having “sort of a painted harlot effect,” i.e. everyone’s skin was chalk white, my lips were unnaturally red, and our mothers looked like they had raccoon makeup. Furthermore, there seemed to be a significant loss of image quality whenever I edited a photo in Shutterfly — the worst photos by far were the ones I’d cropped using the Shutterfly “edit” tool. We ended up replacing every single Shutterfly 8×10 with a Snapfish print.
I was so unhappy with these prints that I tried to return them in accordance with the Shutterfly 30-day guarantee, but as of yet, Shutterfly has failed to issue me any credit. Boo.
Grade: C-
iPhoto
Products ordered: 8×10 books
I’m a Mac girl, and so it never even occurred to me to put our albums together on Blurb or another web-based site. iPhoto’s book software was fantastic, practically idiot-proof, and doing the book on my own computer saved me the annoyance of uploading hundreds of photos to an online server. Although at times I wished the layouts were a bit more customizable, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of compiling albums for our parents and grandparents.
But after ordering the books, I started to get nervous. I Googled “iPhoto wedding albums” (yes, I know, why didn’t I do that *first*?) and found several complaints about poor printing and loss of original image quality due to over-compression of large photo files. I consoled myself by noting that those reviews were at least a year old, and hoped for the best.
So I’m happy to report that my concerns were completely unnecessary. The iPhoto books were beautiful! They weren’t as impressive as the archival-quality books a real photographer would put together, of course, but for the price we were quite pleased, and our families were delighted. I’d advise future iPhoto book designers to be careful about which photos they place along the center binding, however — plan to lose between 1/4 inch and 1/2 inch to the binding, which can make for some awkward cropping (my brother lost most of his shoulder in one photo).
The only thing I didn’t like about ordering from the iPhoto store was the shipping policy, which won’t let you combine multiple books in the same shipping package unless the books are identical. Those FedEx charges added significantly to the cost of each book.
Grade: A-
What online printing services have you used?
Hm. Haven’t had to do this yet, so this is very helpful! Thanks, PC.
I used Blurb to create our guest book. It worked quite well and the quality was excellent. I’ve really been wanting to use iphoto, but haven’t yet. Like you said, it’d be nice to not have to upload all the photos somewhere else.
As terrible as it sounds, I’ve had the best luck with prints at Walmart. They’re quick, easy, and the quality has been much higher than any other place I’ve tried.
Kristi, everyone I’ve talked to who used it loves Blurb. And my husband and I have gotten some great prints from our local grocery store too!
I adore mypublisher for photobooks which I used for my parent’s Christmas gifts this year. So so happy and they often have buy one photobook and get another one free which is pretty awesome.
brideonashoestring.wordpress.com
Jess
I’ve had good experiences with Snapfish, although I’ve had some mediocre picture quality and pixelization, but I can’t attest to the quality of the photo file, so I haven’t worried about it.
Thanks for the reviews!
ouuu, Barefoot Bride linked me here and I’m glad she did!
We have a mac, and I’ve looked through iphoto…. and had no idea i could use it for our wedding album! perfect :)
Thank you very much for the tips!
Thanks a ton!! I was just starting to make a photobook in iphoto, and thought, maybe I should check reviews first!!
Thanks for the note on the photos near the binding – that helps!
I love Shutterfly! I always get such great prints with them and the pricing is great. I especially love their holiday packages, my little boy is having his first Halloween and I definitely want to capture every moment. That’s why I was so excited to find out that they are running a deal with buywithme. For $20 you get and 8×8 photo book, a coffee mug and 50 4×6 prints! I can’t wait to get the pictures printed. Here is the link: bit.ly/cm54Cq.
Elizabeth, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this comment isn’t spam (despite the advertising), but I stand by my review of Shutterfly. The quality of the photos they printed for me was inexcusably poor and I just can’t recommend them.
Hi, Im looking to print some for christmas as well. I have really high resolution files (from the photographer) and they came in two DVD disc as the files were so huge.
Did you submit high resolution files or compressed files?
Thanks
Hi Jaq! I’m pretty sure I submitted high-resolution files (and I *definitely* submitted high-res for the iPhoto books). I suspect that part of the reason the Shutterfly ones didn’t turn out great is that Shutterfly took it upon themselves to compress them for me.
I’ve had quite the opposite experience with Shutterfly and Snapfish. The Shutterfly prints I’ve ordered have always been very high quality with great color balance, while the one time I ordered from Snapfish my photos were very dark and some were grainy. The annoying thing was the highest quality photos (those taken with a Nikon D3000 or my bridals which were professional vs. an iPhone) were the grainy, awful ones. I’ll never use Snapfish again and recommend Shutterfly to everyone I know!
I know this is old but I just received my first print order from Shutterfly and after years of using Kodak Gallery I was amazed at the POOR quality of the shots! I used different cameras, including a really nice new Canon and while the shots are stunning on the computer (PC and Mac) I wasn’t pleased at all with the print quality. I’ll give snapfish or some imac product a try. Thanks for your confirmation! I thought I was going nuts.
I agree with Kristen. I also used Shutterfly for the first time after years of getting great quality prints from Kodak Gallery. I was shocked at the poor quality of the prints, even though I was using the same camera and had great looking prints on my computer screen. I am definitely looking for another company to print my pics!
I had bought some photo cards at an Arts and Crafts event and the photographer mentioned that he uses both Shutterfly and Snapfish to print his photos and he has learned “which to use for which color photos” were his words. I must admit I was a poor listener(actually, I DO have memory issues) and it had to do with “blue tones” coming out better with one processor and I think the other folks were better at another color (red/yellow??). Maybe look at what you got and see if it follows this pattern? Just a thought.
By the way, these were photos mounted on cards.
This is the guys website if you want to ask him direct….www.sophstpix.com
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