Disclaimer: anything I put into this entry is purely based on my own experience.  All content is my personal opinion.

I recently placed an order of photos, and was fantastically pleased with the results. But more on that another day – today I want to place some thoughts into writing about how I got here.  Permit me, if you will, to walk through my memories…

In my memory, SnapFish was one of the early entrants to online print shops.  They were also the first online company that I used, and for a while my favorite.  Having said that, I haven’t touched them for several years now.  Looking back, I think it has been about six years since I’ve done anything with them (wow, how time flies!).  Five at best.

Why? When I’m looking for a print shop, I’m generally looking for a combination of quality and price.  When in question, I usually go for quality. Qualities like: no arbitrary halos around features, no changing of colors, no cropping into the picture, decent quality of paper.

Personally, I only found them to be so-so.  It may have been my lesser-experienced eye back then, but the colors seemed to have greens and warm tones amplified. This is a common trick for landscapes and portrait/people shots, respectively – and it just bugs me to no end. On the plus side, it does look pretty good for shots straight out of the camera.  On the not-so-good side, if you do your own post processing, then it’s going to look radioactive.

Of course, that was a while ago.  They probably have fixed that by now.

Those halos?  That’s from oversharpening.  I didn’t really see that on prints from them, but I also didn’t really sharpen my own results.  I wouldn’t hold it against them, were I to do another run of prints.

Cropping?  Oh yes, they definitely do – or did.  And not necessarily a small amount, either: I seem to recall losing up to 5 pixels off the end of a smallish 4×6″ print.

Paper?  Decent quality, but felt a bit flimsy compared to other papers. Nothing I’d hold against them, but nothing I’d use for photos of any large size.

So to summarize: I’ve found that SnapFish did pretty good work, but I’ll only ever use them for cheap 4×6″ prints. Something for collages or other disposable uses.