I had previously signed up with Snapfish and received an e-mail offering me 20 free prints with my first order. So I proceeded to Snapfish and logged into my account. The website “remembered” that I had free photographs coming and this fact was noted on the welcome page. I was glad for the confirmation, as I couldn’t remember with certainty what the offer from Snapfish had been and I’d lost the original e-mail.
Snapfish.com by HP 
To upload my photographs I had to enable my web browser to accept the Snapfish software download and click install. The website prompted me to complete each of these steps. I named a photo album and proceeded to select my photographs. I did not pre-edit these photos before uploading, but I had given them names and placed the ones I needed to print into a separate folder to make them easy to find. One of the things I find most challenging about creating digital prints is remembering which ones and how many I’ve created. I am working through a backlog of old photographs spanning two birthdays, Christmas and our vacation so there are a lot of prints to be made. Keeping track should become easier once I’m printing as I go. The upload of photographs was easy. I was able to select the photos I wanted with little trouble and the upload rate was a respectable 80-150 KB/sec most of the time, though it did drop down to 20 KB/sec occasionally. The total upload time took around 15 minutes for 38 pictures and a status bar kept me appraised of its progress. Next to the upload screen was a help bar that offered to show you the upload process “step-by-step”. There was also a note indicating that if you were having technical difficulties you might want to try uploading the photographs one by one with a link to do so. I appreciated the ease of use and the helpful offers of assistance.
The site seemed to freeze up on the last picture, the status bar indicated that it was 100% complete but showed only 37 0f 38 pictures uploaded. After waiting a minute or so I chose the “Ctl-Alt-Delete” option and closed down the program. I was performing other tasks online when the freeze took place, so perhaps that was the problem. I returned to the website and logged back in to find all 38 photos, so I moved on to the next step.
Preserve Your Family’s Memories with Snapfish by HP 
Snapfish allows you to edit your album attributes, giving it a title, a description and most importantly- selecting the cover picture. After selecting the picture that I wanted to appear up front, I moved on to editing individual photographs. While you have to select one edit option, such as “fix” or “add borders” to get started, once inside the edit portion of the website all the other options are available by selecting different tabs. You can also choose to save your edits either as a replacement of the original uploaded picture or a copy.
Most of the options you will want to prepare your photographs for publication are under the edit option, including editing the captions for each photo. I could not get the crop feature to allow me to freely adjust the size of the photos, for instance zooming in on just one corner while maintaining the full height of the photo. But otherwise, I was able to crop photographs, enhance images and add borders using the Snapfish edit features. I also had a little trouble getting to some of the edit features a time or two and had to exit back to the view photograph level and re-select the picture before all of my options were visible. I have noticed with all of the digital photo editing sites that performance if very dependent on time of day and Internet connection. At times it can require a great deal of patience to get the results that you want. But they are nice results.
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I initially thought I'd put all the photographs in a single flipbook, similar to the ones I'd made at Sony Image Station, thinking the cost would be similar. However, while Sony allows you 20 pictures for the base flipbook price, Snapfish only allows 5 with each additional page being $0.99. While the initial price may look higher at one site over another, the real determining factor is how many pictures can you get in that one book for the price? Of course, you'll also want to factor any free shipping or coupon offers. In general, it's probably best to know what method you want to use to publish a particular set of photos and then find the site that offers the best combination of deals for that option.
Because the flipbook wasn't a cost effective option for these pictures, I decided to get prints made. I opted not to place any border on this set and do minimal editing and was able to quickly prepare my photos for ordering. I proceeded to purchase my prints by selecting all the prints in the album and deleting from the order just the few I didn’t want. I added additional copies to the order page, updated and checked out easily. I did have to go back once to change the finish to matte as glossy is the default. You can pick up your photographs at a local retailer, but only in glossy finish so I chose to have my prints delivery. That decision turned out not to cost me anything. Because not only did I have the credit to get 20 prints free, but I also had a free shipping code for January.
So I was able to order 47 regular prints and 1 5x7 for just $4.27! According to the website, that was a savings of $10.59! I was very pleased with the savings and would return to Snapfish to order prints.
