ALAFOTO

Snapfish

By Alafoto September-1-2010

Snapfish

Snapfish is a fairly standard photo sharing and print ordering web site brought to you by Hewlett Packard – the folks who make PCs. We are looking at it as a photo sharing web site, but it is clear from the outset that what HP really want you to do is order prints and personalized photo gifts.

Costs:

Signing up is completely free and gets you 20 free prints

Features:

Simple photo sharing site with lots of options to buy prints and gifts
Nicely designed and easy to use
Run by household name IT service provider HP
Share single photos or whole albums with your friends
Order prints of your favourite photos up to poster size
Upload photos to your account by email
Create personalized greetings cards and have them professionally printed
Easily embed photos in your blog or social network
Create personalised gifts from your photos and order them direct to your door
Online editing features to enhance your photos
Easily fix common problems like red eye or dark shots
Add fun borders to your snaps
Downloadable software to help you transfer pictures from your camera
Upload snaps from your mobile phone
Pre-paid print plans for extra savings
20 prints for free when you join!
Signing up is completely free
Works with almost any device that can run a web browser

Snapfish is a fairly standard photo sharing and print ordering web site brought to you by Hewlett Packard – the folks who make PCs. We are looking at it as a photo sharing web site, but it is clear from the outset that what HP really want you to do is order prints and personalized photo gifts. However, the photo sharing facilities are good enough to warrant a spot in our top ten and the products you can order are mostly pretty good quality.

The most important thing with any photo sharing web site is to get your photos uploaded for people to see in the first place. Just as well then, that Snapfish offers a variety of different easy ways to transfer photos to your account. The one most people will use is the web uploader which is well made and lets you upload several photos at a time. There is also a Flash based ‘express’ uploader which provides you with a slightly more glamorous user interface. While neither option is the best we have seen, both are easy enough to use for uploading a few photos. What disappointed us about the upload situation was that there is no mobile application, iPhone or otherwise, for uploading your photos. The website does claim that you can upload from your phone, but it involves emailing photos to a specific address. This is a bit of a clunky way to do it and not nearly as user friendly and streamlined as we have seen from other services.

So once you have uploaded some photos to your account you will probably want to start sharing them with your friends and family. Snapfish allows you to do this very easily by providing an email address, or list of email addresses to which it will then email direct links to your photos or albums. It is also possible to use Snapfish as hosting for your photos and link directly to them from your blog or favourite social networking site. If you are feeling a bit more adventurous you can also create slideshows or photo-books and share them too. This is very easy to do and the final results can look quite good with a bit of effort. Furthermore, if you create a group room then your friends and family can leave comments on your photos.

As you are often reminded when using the site, Snapfish also lets you order prints or gifts made from any photos that you upload. Although the constant hard sell can get a bit annoying, it’s actually a pretty decent service on offer with some good quality products. We particularly like the fact you can order your own personalized Royal Mail postage stamps to add an extra touch to greetings cards. The prices are also some of the most reasonable around and are easily comparable to most of the major operators.

Snapfish is a pretty good all round service. It would perhaps benefit from some extra or improved community features, but as a basic photo sharing service it’s fine. If you are mainly after a good online print store then you are in luck and the sharing facilities really add to the value of the service. Signing up is free and you get 20 prints for free too so we recommend giving it a try to see if it’s right for you.