Photobox.co.uk - try it! (photobox.co.uk)

Member Name: MichaelAshcroft

Product:	photobox.co.uk
Date:	06/09/06 (131 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, cheap and reliable

Disadvantages: requires a credit/debit card

**First published on ciao by MichaelAshcroft**

Oh how great the age of the digital camera. In the olden days you’d put the film carefully in the camera, go on holiday, and take your pictures. The films go into those lovely little plastic cylinders; but in my house that’s where the story ends. I still have a myriad of little plastic cylinders in a drawer somewhere, and there they shall remain! The act of taking the films to a shop on the high street always seemed time consuming and expensive – and usually pointless due to my appalling photographic skills! How things have changed though! In this enlightened, modern age, we can see the picture we take before we take it! We can delete the photos of an embarrassing moment, which we want to be consigned to electronic oblivion. We can even store an almost unlimited number of photos on something the size of a fingernail, but none of this compares to what we can do now.

Enter photobox.co.uk. Now, not only can we do all of the above, but we can order the best of the photos we have, and have them delivered to our door just days later. I like this. I am an extremely lazy person, so when I found the site I was amazed - a website that provides a service for me, a lazy man. So without any further ado: my opinions, thoughts and musings on photobox.com

===How to use Photobox===

---Sign up---

Registration is free and easy. All you need to do is give them your name and an email address. They ask for your mobile number, but it isn’t required. Once you have an account they give you 30 free print credits, which just means that you don’t have to pay for the first 30 prints. I don’t think this applies to canvases and gifts etc, just the normal prints. Be careful though, these credits do have a time limit, which I didn’t realise until it was too late, losing 7 prints. Shame on me for not paying more attention!

---Uploading your photos---

Uploading your beloved pictures is really very easy. You can upload by email or FTP, or you can upload each file manually with a standard browser up-loader, although I personally prefer the little applet provided. This allows you to open your photo album and select as many files as you want, to then click and drag them over to Photobox. Once there, all you have to do is click “start upload”. Tricky that. Be warned that if you have a dial up connection and decide to upload several hundred photos, don’t expect it to be quick. If you have broadband though, it really doesn’t take long at all.

---Sharing your photos---

Any folder you have on Photobox can be shared with any other member, or made public if you want. If you want a private folder, so only you can see the photos, do nothing! This is the default setting. To share a private folder with the important people in your life, just send them an email. They will then have to sign up (still free) and can see your glorious pictures. I’ve discovered a slight flaw with this feature though. If, like me, you have more than one email address, the problem arises. When you sign up to Photobox, you are essentially recognised by your email address rather than by username. This means that when other people invite you to see their folders, they will use the email address they know, but when you try to log on, Photobox will not recognise you since they’ve invited a different email address. This can be overcome by using your hotmail address (most people have one nowadays) since this is the one that most people tend to use.

---Ordering your photos---

After all the “free” things you’ve been able to do so far, this is the part when you have to part with your hard earned cash. Happily, it’s not a lot of cash! In your albums, you simply have to highlight the photos you want, and click “add to basket”. In your basket you can make all the changes to your order to make sure all your prints are just so. As far as I’m aware, there’s no limit to how many photos you can print in one go, in fact, Photobox encourage you to get more in one order, with cheaper bulk orders. As I’m looking at the checkout now, there’s a banner saying “Photographic products: dispatched within 1 working day”. This is when my jaw dropped. One day?! They get your order, process it, print it and dispatch it in one day! I have yet to be let down by the service, it really is first rate. You can crop, resize and rotate your photos before you buy them. Photobox also provide a handy feature – they provide a bar which tells you the quality of the photos you’re going to buy, though most newish digital cameras will likely be ranked “10/10”

---The cost---

If you’ve just come back from holiday and want to get your photos, then you’ll be looking at a cost of 10p per print. If you’re a click happy photographer and have taken more than 150, 300 or 500 prints then you’ll pay 8p, 7p, or 5p respectively. As the size of the print increases, so does the price (well that makes sense) all the way up to £18.99 for a 30” x 20” print. Beyond that the gift prices do get quite high, but you won’t use those often, if at all. I’ve never found a need for anything other than the standard sizes. The price for a 70cm square canvas is £129.99, so you can see the range of prices you may pay if you want to try some more unusual products.

TIP: If you’re going to order a lot of prints, order them at once. Not only do you get discounts for bulk buying, but you also only pay the P&P once. The P&P is a minimum of £1.50 every time, go up to £9.99 for special delivery. Clearly, ordering one print at a time would thus cost you £1.60 per print, rather than 10p. This is not a good idea!

When you do order, you need to provide a billing address and a delivery address. This allows you to send your prints to a different address as a gift or to a friend who is not on the internet.

---Receiving your photos---

This is the most joyous part of the whole thing. You go to the post box, keen and optimistic. You’re not to be let down; the prints arrive in a plastic box which contains a paper folder and your photos. Congratulations! You’ve just moved into the internet age! No more worrying about buying photo quality paper, or replacing the ink cartridges in your specially purchased photo printer. Or even buying the printer in the first place! Ironically, your first order with Photobox could save you several hundred pounds! The prints are of fantastic quality, just the kind you’d expect from a high street shop.

---Seriously now---

Now then: some common sense. One of the annoying things about digital photography is that if you are an avid amateur (or pro) photographer, you’re going to use up masses of disk space. Before long, you’ll find that the size of your Photo Albums have a strange “GB” symbol after the number. This is big! The photos are clogging up your hard drive, what do you do?! Well, you store them somewhere else obviously. You could buy an external hard drive but this can be expensive. Photobox has the answer. With every order you place you increase the amount of space you have on Photobox, I remember that after just one order, I suddenly had 250MB available to me. This is clearly cheaper than buying an external hard drive, and has the advantage of being safer since it’s off site, and you can share your beloved photos with your friends and family.

---To summarise---

Ok, that was a long review, and you may have nodded off half way through, terribly sorry if you did, so here’s a summary in handy /10 form for your convenience!

Ease of use – 9/10
Quality of service– 10/10
Speed of service – 10/10
Value for money – 9/10

Overall - 9.5/10

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So that’s Photobox.co.uk. There is more I could say, but I think life should still have some mystery to it, so find out for yourselves what else you can do! It’s very much worth it. I hope you enjoy using the service as much as I have!

Thanks for reading

Michael

Summary: An excellent service, great quality prints, and very quick and cheap