Online Printing Services Review: Ofoto, Shutteryfly, and Snapfish

Always looking to get great prints of my digital photos (and a good price) I recently tried out some of the online printing/sharing photo services. I tested Ofoto, Shutterfly, and Snapfish by ordering some 4x6 prints of various digital photos ranging in image quality. (They were all jpeg files) Most of these services offer free prints when you sign up and you only have to pay a small shipping fee to get your free prints. (I was able to find a code on the web to get 50 free Snapfish prints.)

Ofoto (Kodak Gallery)

Ofoto is now owned by Kodak and is called the Kodak Gallery. At the time I ordered some digital prints it was still Ofoto. Here’s how the service works: you upload your photos to their website and then you can order prints, personal gifts like photo books and picture coffee mugs, and you can also share your photos on the web with your friends and family. Then your friends and family can order the same prints and gifts.

You get a main page like the one above and you can navigate to where you want to go. Uploading photos was easy but does take quite a bit of time because you are uploading your photos to their web server. When you share your photos you have to send an email to the person you want to see the photos and they are taken to a link to view your photos. None of these services are made for sharing your photos. I think this is just a feature these services use so your family and friends will buy more photos. ( I recommend Flickr for a great photo sharing service) Ordering prints is easy as well – select an album or photo and you are taken to a standard page to select your options. Here’s the latest Kodak prices:

The shipping was cheap and my photos showed up a week or two later. The image quality was great: they used high glossy paper and the colors were sharp and vibrant. You could tell they used a good high end printer for my prints.

Shutterfly

Shutterfly works the same as Ofoto – it is essentially an uploading service to print off your digital photos and throws in some photo sharing capability along with some other features.

I liked Shutterfly’s site better than Ofoto. You can do basic image editing such as cropping and rotating your images. There seems to be more of a selection of the types of personalized gifts you can order as well. Once again, the sharing capability is very weak and uses the same email links to share your photos.

Shutterfly’s prices are about the same as Ofoto for printing and the image quality was just as good. To be honest, I really couldn’t tell the difference between the two services – I was really impressed with the quality of the printed images.

Snapfish

Snapfish, along with Ofoto and Shutterfly, offer the same exact services of offering to print your photos but also doing some photo sharing and other features. Snapfish has just recently been bought by HP.

I wasn’t a big fan of Snapfish’s website but I think it has changed now that it has been bought by HP. They do the same email links to share your photos.

Snapfish has just about the same pricing as the other services. I believe all three services offer discount pricing as well. I certainly hope that HP improves the image quality of Snapfish prints because I was really disappointed by the image quality. Ofoto and Shutterfly blow Snapfish out of the water in terms of image quality.

Summary

There are a lot of online photo printing services that are trying to advertise themselves as something they are not: photo sharing services. For something like that you should use Flickr. Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery) and Shutterfly have great image quality for their printing but Snapfish needs some serious work. The prices aren’t bad at about $.025 per 4x6 and the shipping is usually low. If you want to print some of your digital photos - and let your family and friends do the same – then these services should work fine. For anything else, I would look elsewhere.