Online Photo Services Shootout

Plenty of Web-based companies will make prints of your favorite pics, but which service is the best?

Online photo services let you upload your digital images, share them with friends and family, and order everything from standard prints to mugs, calendars, and T-shirts. To determine which of them offer the best combination of high-quality prints, price, and handy online tools, we looked at five prominent services: Kodak EasyShare Gallery (formerly Ofoto), Shutterfly, Snapfish, Wal-Mart Photo Center, and Yahoo Photos, rating everything from image-editing features to delivery options to print sizes. Our PC World Test Center jury also took a long hard look at the prints from each source to decide which service delivered the best quality. To establish a baseline for comparison, we used Canon's $200 Pixma iP6600D, the top photo printer in our February chart to print the same set of images.

Our findings: The Kodak EasyShare Gallery earned our highest marks, thanks in large part to its prints, which earned an overall print rating of Very Good from our judges. At the other extreme, mediocre print quality caused Wal-Mart's Photo Center service to finish last in our group, despite the service's remarkably low prices.

Meanwhile, our judges concluded that prints from the Canon printer looked just as good, on average, as those from Kodak. Canon estimates the iP6600D's per-print pricing (including ink and Photo Pro paper) for a 4-by-6 at 65 cents, a 5-by-7 at $1.05, and an 8-by-10 at $1.12. PC World hasn't independently verified those per-print prices, but even if they're optimistic (as vendor estimates often are) you're likely to save some money with the printer if you tend to order lots of 8-by-10 prints. And let's not forget the immediate gratification of making prints when you want them, without having to wait days for them to arrive.

For our jury tests, we uploaded and ordered prints of three different sample photos. The resulting print quality scores made up 50 percent of each service's PCW Rating. Senior Associate Editor Melissa J. Perenson provided the images for our 4-by-6 print (a woman in a traditional Japanese wedding kimono) and our 5-by-7 print (the Roman Coliseum). Test Center Senior Data Analyst Tony K. Leung shot the image for our 8-by-10 print--the standard still-life shot that we use for all digital camera testing.

Of the services, Kodak's service did the best job on both the 4-by-6 print and the 5-by-7 print. Judges awarded the 4-by-6 Kodak print high marks for color accuracy, skin tone quality, exposure, and overall quality. The lower-rated Wal-Mart and Yahoo images had oversaturated blacks that caused details in dark clothing to vanish.

Kodak's 5-by-7 print showed good color balance, exposure, and overall quality, despite a minor amount of noise in the ultrablue sky. Noise was a major distraction in the last-place Wal-Mart print, which also poorly reproduced details in features such as the flag perched atop the Coliseum.

Yahoo Photos' reproduction of our still-life image scored the highest of all the 8-by-10 prints, thanks especially to skin-tone accuracy and overall quality. Once again, Wal-Mart Photo Center brought up the rear, with its large-sized print exhibiting overexposure and poor sharpness.

pricing made up 20 percent of each service's PCW Rating. We calculated the costs of our three prints together with the charge for the least-expensive method of shipping (we excluded taxes, however, since they can vary by state). On this measure, Wal-Mart was the clear winner, with a total cost of $3.74, followed by Yahoo at $4.22 and Snapfish at $4.89. Kodak's EasyShare Gallery was significantly more expensive, at $6.62, but Shutterfly was the most expensive at $6.89.

For the 4-by-6 prints, both Wal-Mart and Snapfish charged only 12 cents per print, while Shutterfly was highest at 19 cents each. Wal-Mart and Yahoo offered the lowest-priced 5-by-7 prints, at 58 and 59 cents each, respectively, while Kodak and Shutterfly charged the most at 99 cents. The 8-by-10 pricing ranged from $1.96 per print at Wal-Mart to $3.99 each at Kodak and Shutterfly.

The final two components of the services' PCW Ratings, with a weight of 15 percent each, related to specifications (print size selection, shopping features, and delivery options) and design and usability (ease of use, quality of online image-editing tools, multiple-browser support, and photo-sharing features).

All five sites have developed fairly easy-to-use interfaces, though Kodak's and Shutterfly's seemed the most intuitive. Nevertheless, we ran into various issues using the Mozilla Firefox browser on each service. For example, Snapfish (which was the only service besides Yahoo Photos to allow batch uploads using the browser) didn't display its image-editing tools when we used Firefox. Yahoo Photos similarly failed to support image-editing in Firefox, but under Internet Explorer its tools were among the best.

Online photo sharing is a major draw for digital camera users, and all five services let you send e-mail invitations to multiple recipients to view your photos; Yahoo also permits you to share digital images through its instant-messenger service). Wal-Mart lets you store and share your digital photos online for only 60 days; to keep them up longer, you can rent 10MB to 100MB of storage for 74 cents to $7.40 per year.

Yahoo's service offered the greatest number of print sizes (11), including multiple poster-size print options, while Wal-Mart offered the fewest. All five sites scored well for nonprint products such as mugs and T-shirts; there are very few items that these sites won't let you slap a photo on.

Each offers shipping options ranging from standard postal service to pricey next-day delivery. Yahoo also offers in-store pickup at Target, Snapfish at Walgreens, and Kodak at CVS Pharmacy. And of course, you can elect to get your Wal-Mart pictures from your Wal-Mart. Each service charges a slightly different fee for pickup; Shutterfly doesn't offer the option.

An online photo service must offer excellent print quality, which Kodak's EasyShare Gallery does. Add to that a well-designed Web site, plenty of online tools, and a plethora of print and delivery options, and Kodak is hard to beat, despite higher prices than most of its competitors.

Kodak's strongest print-quality rival turned out to be not a service but the $200 Canon Pixma iP6600D photo printer, an excellent choice for photographers who want a print of their masterpieces sooner rather than later.

Tom Mainelli

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