Snapfish: well worth taking them up on their offer of free photos. (Snapfish)

Member Name: Palice

Product:	Snapfish
Date:	16/01/09 (79 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, easy to use site, good photo editing features, great matt option. And FREE!

Disadvantages: No longer free delivery although this is not uncommon, some cropping of pictures.

I really like Snapfish. The first time I used it I was a new customer (obviously) and therefore got 20 free photo credits (for normal-sized 4*6" photos) plus I found a code for an extra 20. AND there's an extra £3.50 on quidco for new customers. Hooray!

So right off the bat I got 40 FREE photos, and a potential £3.50 back from quidco. I was off to a good start. Unlike photobox, which I have also used, there is no charge for delivery; that's right, FREE DELIVERY if you get the items sent to a Jessops or Klick store. So no outlay at all for some photos I really wanted printing out!

So even if the website had been horrible to use, and had taken ages, I would feel like I'd gotten value for (no) money.

Luckily though, the site is a breeze to use. To upload your photos as fast as possible you have to download their uploader software, but this is fairly standard practice for photo sites. The software is great to use, and works about the same as any other photo uploader I've used - on facebook, photobox and tesco (though tesco's was a while ago) - and is fairly quick, obviously depending on your internet connection.

The only thing you need to be careful with is if you've gone through a folder on your computer and carefully selected all the photos you want to upload, DON'T navigate out of the folder (e.g. if you wanted to select some from another folder as well) as all your careful selections will be lost. Just do one folder at a time.

After the photos are uploaded into an online album, you are able to view, rotate, add borders and captions, move, copy or delete and generally fiddle about with them until you're happy.

They have a fix/enhance function on the album which allows you to:

- Fill in flash [generally brightens up the photo (you can select how strongly it does this)]

- Correct red eye [my camera does this automatically so I can't comment on how well it does this]

- Autocorrect/contrast [corrects the colours or the contrast in the photo, and is worth playing about with to see if it makes it look any better.]

If you don't have any photo editing software you'll find this section makes your photos look much more vibrant and professional-looking, that is, if you can be bothered to correct every photo in the album...

Once you are happy with your photos, you click 'order entire album', and go to the checkout. This process is easy, and it's nice to see the free photo credits and discount codes bringing your order down to 0!

If you've taken the photos with a digital camera... (er, well how else would they be on your computer I ask?) the site tells you it's noticed you've taken the photos with a digital camera. How observant. It then says that you can choose for your photos to be 'Optomised TrueDigital Prints' - whatever that is. Basically you can choose for your photos to be printed out at 5.3*4", or slightly narrower, which apparently fits better with most digital cameras' ratios. Alternatively, you can choose for the photos to be cropped horizontally so that they fit the paper.

If you want to frame your photos, good luck trying to find 5.3" frames, but if not, and you haven't used the widescreen setting on your camera, I would recommend going for the True watchamacallit option.

If you have taken your photos on the widescreen setting, as I did, definitely go for the 6*4" option, as if anything, this isn't wide /enough/ for your photos, so the narrower setting would be adding insult to injury. As it was, my widescreen photos were cropped at the sides slightly, but it didn't really make much difference to most of the photos.

One really nice touch which snapfish offered that photobox did not, (at the time, I don't know whether this has changed) was the choice to print out matt photos. I strongly recommend choosing this option, it's no extra cost and the photos look much more professional in my opinion. Well, unless you love shiny photos.

The Snapfish photos certainly look better than the tesco's ones, and a bit better than Photobox's ones, so anyone trying to decide between the services, you know which one I'd pick.

As I'm writing this review, I've been going on the site and placing a fake order just to check I'm giving out the right information etc. and noticed that you can no longer get the photos delivered to a Jessops store! Please let me know if it's just me not choosing the right options, but I'm doing everything I did with my last order and the option isn't coming up. Sorry folks, looks like you'll have to pay the abhorrent delivery charge of 99p!

Still, this is a good photo site, and the free credits given are generous (though not as generous as some sites...!) and you can always look around for codes for more. Addtionally, they've offered me a free high-res photo, and though I don't really know what the difference is, it's nice to be offered free stuff.

Recommended.

Summary: One of the better photo sites out there, better than Tesco's at least.