Online photo services take some hassle out of sharing memories
By Deborah Porterfield
Gannett News Service
You've captured dozens of great shots at the summer cookout with your new digital camera. The problem: everyone wants a copy. You could try e-mailing the images, but that would tie up the mailboxes of folks stuck with slow dial-up connections, and besides, a few friends aren't online yet. You could print the pictures yourself, but that would take hours, and the ink and photo paper would cost a small fortune.
Trying an online photo service might be a smarter option. With most of these, you can transfer your images to a free online photo album, e-mail a link to friends so they can see the pictures on the Web, order prints, or better yet, let folks order their own.
While these online services are still in their infancy, their numbers are growing rapidly. Photo revenues at these sites jumped from
$8 million in 2000 to $23 million in 2001, according to the InfoTrends Research Group. And Kristy Holch, an analyst with a Boston research firm, predicts that revenues will continue to increase about 40 percent each year through 2007.
Why the surge in popularity? Holch said online photo sites make it easy to share digital pictures and the prints often look better than those people can create at home. Plus, the sites let you put your favorite photos on everything from coffee mugs to sticker books.
"The biggest challenge these photo services face is getting people to try them for the first time," she said.
But which site should you try first? To help narrow the field, we sent the same 10 digital images to five different photo services. On each site we created a free, password-protected online photo album and ordered 10 4-by-6 prints. All delivered respectable prints in five to eight days at prices that ranged from 19 cents to 49 cents each. But because many sites offer free prints to first-time users, the photos often ended up costing much less.
Ease of use: This site suggests the best size for different photos and flags those that won't reproduce well. It also gives you the option to turn off a zoom and a trim feature that forces photos to fit in standard print sizes. It took 20 minutes to download a program that lets you touch up photos and speed up transfers. Uploading the photos ate up an additional 30 minutes.
Service: Glossy Kodak prints with index arrived in eight days. Site offers replacement photos or refund to unhappy customers.
Quality: Prints looked fine, except for an oddly cropped one that clipped a child's body on the bottom instead of a rock on top.
Price: 49 cents for a 4-by-6 print. Total cost: $4.90. (Shipping, which normally is $1.49, was free.)
Bottom line: One of the pricier sites, but at least it lets you decide how your pictures will look.
Ease of use: Transferring photos took about 35 minutes. A confusing interface makes it difficult to find previously created photo albums and to retrieve forgotten passwords.
Service: Glossy prints and photo index arrived in eight days. Full refunds available.
Quality: The service cropped photos with an intelligent eye, but the reproduction seemed inconsistent: A few shots came out darker than expected, others lighter.
Price: 19 cents for each 4-by-6 print. Total cost for 10 added up to $3.65, including $1.75 for shipping.
Bottom line: Lowest-priced prints make this a smart choice for bargain hunters.
Ease of Use: It only takes a minute to download software that lets you preview photos and then drop and drag those you want to transfer. Just be prepared for a wait: Uploading 10 photos with a 56K modem took about an hour, twice as long as the site's estimate. Also, the drop-and-drag feature isn't available for Macintosh and Netscape users.
Service: Glossy prints on Kodak paper showed up in six days. Refunds or reprints are available for unhappy customers.
Quality: Photos that fit into the standard sizes looked fine. There were a couple of odd-shaped pictures, which the site flagged as problems. The photos didn't look good because the service trimmed heads and sliced off limbs to make them fit into a 4-by-6 format rather than printing them as is with white space around the edges.
Price: 45 cents for a 4-by-6 print. First 10 are free with $1.49 for shipping and handling.
Bottom line: Freebies make this site a good bet for standard-sized prints.
Ease of use: It took three tries to transfer all 10 photos to the site. Once there, a five-bar photo meter gauged each image's quality and suitability for printing in various sizes. An image with one bar is fine for a postcard or magnet while one with five bars is good enough for an 18-inch-by-24-inch poster.
Service: Glossy photos on FujiColor paper arrived in five days. Just don't count on a refund if you order a print of a fuzzy photo: The site's fine print makes it clear that the customer isn't always right.
Quality: Site did best job bringing out the best in mediocre photos, but because it crops photos to fit standard print sizes, tight shots with unusual shapes didn't fare well.
Price: 49 cents for a 4-by-6 print. Total cost for 10 prints came to $7.17, including $1.95 for shipping, plus sales tax.
Bottom line: Pricey, albeit good-looking prints and numerous photo-gift options make the service a good bet — unless you encounter problems transferring the pictures.
Ease of use: Downloading a plug-in that simplifies the transfer of photos took about three minutes; uploading 10 photos took about 50. You can enhance photos online, preview pictures in different sizes and easily add captions to the back of pictures.
Service: Glossy prints with photo index arrived in eight days. Will issue refunds unless you're complaining about your own typos or blurry images that the site flagged as poor bets.
Quality: Because the service lets you choose between having a photo cropped into a 4-by-6 shape or printing it as is with white space around the edges, all the photos — even odd-shaped ones — looked good.
Price: A 4-by-6 print costs 49 cents. First-time users get 15 4-by-6 prints free with $1.49 for shipping.
Bottom line: A good bet for photographers whose pictures don't always come out as perfect 4-by-6 prints.
