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The Best Online Photo Printing Services for 2021

Your photos deserve a better showcase than just a mobile screen. We test and rate the best online photo printing services to fill you in on which offer the lowest prices, the best user experience, and the highest-quality prints.

Updated November 19, 2021

There's a big difference between a photo and a photograph. The latter is an object itself, rather than just an image file displayed on a screen. Sure, you can hold your phone up to someone's face to show them snapshots of your baby niece, but that's no way to proudly display a favorite shot. Online photo printers like Mpix, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Walmart Photo exist because people still want photo prints. The services included here can produce high-quality prints and memorabilia from your digital photos, whether that's in the form of wallet-size snapshots or wall-size photo canvases.

Below, we give you some helpful ideas of what factors you should consider when choosing a photo printing service to give your digital keepsakes physical form.

How Much Do Photo Print Services Cost?

You don't have to break the bank to get printed photos. For 15 cents or less per photo, you can have 4-by-6-inch prints from several services here. Walmart has the lowest price at just 9 cents. Mpix charges 36 cents for a mailed 4-by-6 print, followed by Nations Photo Labs' 32 cents, but both provide excellent image and paper quality. In the middle are Amazon Prints' and Shutterfly's 15 cents for a 4-by-6. Local pickup options tend to cost more. CVS Photo and Walgreens start at 37 cents for 4-by-6s for local pickup, but you can often get your photos faster this way.

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Even if you want enlargements at popular sizes, such as 5-by-7 and 8-by-10, you don't have to spend a lot. Snapfish will send you 5-by-7s for just 69 cents each. Nations Photo Labs and Printique (formerly known as AdoramaPix) charge $2.49 for an 8-by-10 print, and most other services charge a still-reasonable $2.99–$3.99 for that size. For wall-art-size prints, you'll pay more, but prices still aren't exorbitant. All the services in this roundup sell 16-by-20 prints for about $20, and most charge closer to $15.

One thing worth keeping in mind is that most of the services included here offer special discount pricing from time to time. The See It links above often lead to some unexpected bargains and offers.

Photo Gifts and Cards

Why stop at ordinary photo prints, when you can have your pictures grace mugs, playing cards, and even pillows? The services here offer a remarkable assortment of objects that you can personalize. All offer greeting cards, calendars, and photo books (more on this below). Most offer phone cases, blankets, and coffee mugs.

Holiday cards mean so much more when they include a photo or photos of your family, and most of the services here can produce them for you at reasonable rates. Most offer 5-by-7 flat cards, which cost in the range from below 50 cents (from Walmart) to about $3 from the higher end services. A few offer traditional folding cards for a bit more. You'll pay less per card with a larger order volume. Premium options like foil printing, special cutout shapes, and linen card stock can be had at premium prices.

Shutterfly offers the largest selection of photo gifts, with flowerpots, blankets, cell phone cases, pillows, shower curtains, and even food bowls for your pets. CVS can sell you a necktie featuring your picture or multiple copies of one shot. I'm still waiting for someone to offer photo-embellished rugs and lampshades. A couple of fun options that many do offer are puzzles and magnets. Walmart will sell you a teddy bear wearing a t-shirt sporting your photo. Some of the latest photo gifts I've seen are capes for kids, drawstring backpacks, tea towels, pot holders, bottle openers, tote bags, and pet food containers.

Large Canvas Prints

Two services included here, CanvasChamp and CanvasPop, don't even print standard small photos, but instead offer only large wall art (as well as magnets and pillows). CanvasPop offers 12-by-8 canvas prints wrapped on a 3/4-inch frame for $83. The company also offers retouching and restoration services. CanvasChamp offers prints up to 54 by 54 inches and is more budget-oriented than CanvasPop, with prices starting at just $4.25 for a 5-by-7 or 8-by-8-inch canvas, but the quality doesn't match that of CanvasPop.

Those two services aren't the only ones that can turn your photos into large wall art. Nations Photo Lab's canvas offerings start at $49 for an 8-by-10 stretched on a 3/4-inch frame, and Snapfish's start at $19.99 for a 4-by-6 canvas. Printique charges $25.99 for an 8-by-8 canvas and runs all the way up to $183.99 for a 24-by-36-inch canvas. Mpix's gallery-wrapped canvas prints start at $59.99 for an 8-by-10.

Mounted Prints

Most of the services also offer a choice of hard backings for larger prints, and they'll also frame your picture. Mounting options for Shutterfly include printing on card stock, which starts at $3.99 for a 5-by-7. The same size on Pearl Shimmer card stock lists for $5.99, and adding a frame takes the price to $99.98. (Again, these are list prices; you can often find great discounts.)

Card stock isn't as suitable for wall hanging as other options, such as styrene, standouts, gator board, and metal prints (more on this last type of print below). Gator board is stronger than standard foam plastic and it's easy to hang on the wall because it's impregnated with wood fibers. All these types of backing are available from many of the online photo printing services included here.

Mpix offers a CollageWall option that lets you group related shots with a matching background. These start at $84.99 for a 1.5-by-1.5-foot array consisting of four photos. Other services, including Printique, offer similar décor solutions.

Metal prints are an elegant, more permanent option offered by several services. With this process, your photo is printed directly onto a metallic surface for more vivid colors and contrast. Mpix can print to paper using a similar effect, with its Metallic Print option. In actual printing on metal, Nations Photo Lab charges $16 for a 4-by-6, and $28 for an 8-by-10, for example. Its largest metal option is a substantial 24 by 36 inches, which lists for $230.

A new, stylish twist from Snapfish is its maple wood mounting. This option starts at $129.99 for an 16-by-20 print. The option comes with mounting holes in the back, and the printing process allows the wood grain to show through your image for a rustic look.

Framing adds the ultimate wall-art touch to your large photo prints. It also adds cost. A framed 3.5-by-5 from Mpix costs $26. For matting, you pay an additional $10. Printique charges from $79 to $207 for framed and matted print, depending on the frame chosen, while CanvasPop charges from $89 to $319 for framed prints ranging from 8-by-10 to 30-by-40. You can also get custom sizes.

Printing Photo Books

Almost all the services included here can print books featuring your photos. For special events such as weddings, graduations, and vacations, nothing serves as a better reminder than a professionally printed photo book. The entry-level price for a book is Shutterfly's $9.99 for a 6-by-6-inch hardcover. Printique and Snapfish charge $19.99 for an 8-by-8 book. Nations only makes hardcover books, which start at $29 for 5-by-7-inch books. Mpix offers hardcover books with sewn bindings, called Premium hardcover books starting at $39.99 for a 20-page 5-by-5-inch book and Economy hardcover books starting at $19.99.

Shutterfly has a service that curates your photos and designs a book for if you feel you're not up to the task yourself. The site has one of the best design tools, with three options: Make My Book; Custom Path, which lets you personalize every page; and Simple Path, which instantly lays out your photos.

If you're comfortable with photo editing software, Adobe's Lightroom Classic and Apple's Photos app both offer excellent photo book design tools and let you send your project directly to a professional printer. Lightroom uses the book-only Blurb service, and Apple uses an undisclosed but high-quality publisher.

If you're going to be ordering photos online, it helps if the service has a friendly, navigable website. For example, most services, like Snapfish, let you simply check off all the sizes you want on a single page grid. Others make you select a size for printing before choosing the images you want, and then start over again if you want more sizes.

Snapfish and other services offer basic photo-editing tools, letting you brighten or darken an underexposed or overexposed shot, for example. Many services automatically apply color correction. Nations Photo Labs offers high-level photo editing for a premium price, but we didn't see a big difference in our test prints between premium color-corrections and the service's standard prints.

Online Sharing

A few services let you share your images online. Mpix, Printique, and Shutterfly are particularly strong in this area. Shutterfly even lets you create online mini-websites for your photos. Snapfish and Walgreens Photo let you share online galleries that can be viewed as full-window slideshows. Amazon Photos is particularly strong at online photo sharing and galleries, with unlimited free storage for Prime subscribers. Nations Photo Lab doesn't get involved in online gallery sharing.

Film Processing

This may seem a passé topic, but there's a contingent of photographers who still prefer to shoot on film. I recently needed film processing for one of those disposable underwater cameras for a vacation that involved snorkeling. Companies here that still process film include Mpix and some CVS and Walgreens locations. For a film-only service with more options including black-and-white film, check out The Darkroom. These services usually include a CD or web link with digital copies of your photos, which lets you edit and share them on your PC, but prints usually cost extra.

Mobile Apps for Photo Printing Services

The most popular camera these days is one that's always with you—your phone. Smartphones have come a long way in terms of image quality, with some capturing images with 20 megapixels of resolution or higher. With most photos now being taken by phones, it only makes sense for a photo printing service to offer a mobile app to get the images straight from your phone to the print service.

Amazon and Shutterfly add the ability to order photo gifts, while Snapfish and Walgreens Photo's apps can import photos from social networks, perform some editing, and let you share photos with friends. Nations Photo Labs recently put out a mobile app that lets you order prints not only from the phone but from any of your social accounts.

Delivering Your Photos

If you want your pictures pronto, Walmart Photo or Walgreens is the way to go. Target Photo and CVS Photo also let you pick up prints locally, but we weren't a pleased with their results in our testing.

If you decide you can wait a few days or you want special options not available with local pickup, such as matte finish, mail order is provided by all the services tested. None of them takes an inordinate amount of time. The additional shipping costs for our order of 22 photos ranged from $2.79 to $7.95, although the reason for the difference was stark—packaging. Packaging matters. Amazon packs photos in a soft flimsy envelope compared with the carefully protected Mpix order that arrived in a strong cardboard box with clear plastic envelopes for photo size sets.

Various packaging from photo printing providers

If you want faster delivery, most services offer second-day and overnight delivery, but keep in mind that the products still have to be produced, so "overnight" doesn't necessarily mean your photos will arrive the day after you order them, even if you pay $15 for overnight shipping. Still, it could mean your pictures arrive a few days faster than if you selected standard shipping. In practice, none of our test orders, for which we used the lowest-cost shipping options, took more than five days to arrive.

Print Quality

For us, print quality is the most important factor when ordering prints. How accurately do the photos reflect the images you shot? Most of the prints I received, especially at the smaller 4-by-6-inch size, revealed acceptable image quality, but there are noticeable differences in lighting and saturation. You can see the differences in the mountain scene below.

Paper is another consideration. Most services use Fuji Crystal archive, but the higher-end services like Printique, Mpix, and Nations Photo Lab use truly professional-quality Kodak Endura paper, which is thicker and rated to last longer.

Please don't hesitate to share your experiences with photo printing services in the comments below. To learn more about improving your photos, check out our collections of Quick Tips to Fix Your Bad Photos, Beyond-Basic Photography Tips, and The Best Photo Editing Software. And if you're set on printing your own pictures, our list of the best photo printers is a good place to start.

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