Sure, you can hold your phone up to someone's face to show them snapshots of your baby niece, but you can't really mount your phone on a wall to proudly display a favorite shot. Even though it seems like we've moved past physical media, printing your most prized photos still has value. Plenty of services are still available to produce high-quality 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 you should consider when creating physical keepsakes from your digital photos. First and Foremost: Pricing It turns out you can get hardcopy keepsakes of your visual memories without breaking the bank. Some services we tested, including Snapfish and York Photo Labs, produce 4-by-6-inch prints for just 9 cents apiece. Local pickup options tend to cost more: CVS Photo starts at 33 cents and Walgreens Photo at 29 cents for 4-by-6s, but you pay for the convenience of local pickup, and after 50 prints that price drops to 23 and 20 cents each, respectively. The next-priciest 4-by-6s among the services we tested was Nations Photo Labs, at 28 cents each, but the company provided the best image quality and paper. In the middle is Shutterfly's 15-cent, 4-by-6 prints. 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, and Nations Photo Labs offers excellent-quality 8-by-10s for a mere $1.95 each. AdoramaPix, also known for print quality, charges $1.99 for an 8 by 10 print, and most services charge a still-reasonable $2.99-$3.99 for 8-by-10s. For wall-art size prints, of course, you'll pay more, but it's still not exorbitant: All of the services sell 16-by-20 prints for under $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 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. Shutterfly offers the largest selection of photo gifts, with flowerpots, blankets, cell phone cases, pillows, shower curtains, and even food bowls for your pets. York Photo Labs and CVS can sell you a necktie featuring your picture or multiple copies of one shot. I'm still waiting for one of the companies to offer photo-embellished rugs and lampshades. A couple of fun options that many do offer are puzzles and magnets. Large Canvas Prints One service included here, CanvasPop, doesn't even print standard small photos, but instead offers only large, high-quality wall art (as well as magnets and pillows). CanvasPop's offerings ranges from $33 for an unmounted 8-by-10 canvas to nearly $500 for a massive 76-by-38 inch canvas stretched on a 1.5-inch-deep frame. The company also offers retouching and restoration services. CanvasPop isn't alone in offering your photos in the form of large wall art. Nations Photo Lab's canvas offerings start at $50 for an 8-by-10 stretched on a 3/4-inch frame, and Snapfish's start at $44.99 for an unframed 8-by-8 canvas. AdoramaPix only charges $20.80 for the same 8-by-8 canvas and $24 for an 8-by-10, all the way up to $180.80 for a 24-by-36-inch canvas. 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 cardstock, which starts at $3.99 for a 5-by-7, $7.99 for an 8-by-10, and $19.99 for an 11-by-14 print. But cardstock isn't as suitable for wall hanging as other options such as styrene, standouts, gatorboard, and metal prints (more on this last type of print below). Gatorboard is stronger than standard foam plastic, since it's impregnated with wood fibers, and it's easy to hang on the wall. All these types of backing are available from many of the online photo printing services included here. Metal Prints, Wood Prints, and Framing 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. Nations Photo Lab charges $12 for a 4-by-6, $15 for a 5-by-7, and $22 for an 8-by-10. Its largest metal option is a substantial 20 by 36 inches, which costs $195. A new, stylish twist from Snapfish is its maple wood mounting. This option starts at $69.99 for an 11-by-14 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 and matted 24-by-36 print from Nations Photo Lab costs $188.95. The same from AdoramaPix costs from $129 to $220, depending on the frame chosen, while CanvasPop charges $257 without matting and $321 with matting. Printing Photo Books Almost all of 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 $15.99 for a 7-by-9-inch softcover. Snapfish and Adoramapix charge $19.99 for an 8-by-8 book. Nations only does hardcover books, which start at $29 for 5-by-7-inch books. Shutterfly has a service that curates your photos and designs a book for you, if you feel you're not up to the task yourself. The service has one of the best design interfaces, 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 and Apple's Photos app both offer excellent photo book design tools and let you send your project to a professional printer. Lightroom uses the book-only Blurb service, and Apple uses an undisclosed but high-quality publisher. Editing, Ordering, and Sharing Photos 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 good 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 price premium, but we didn't see a big difference in our test prints between premium color-corrections and the service's standard prints. Online sharing is offered by some services, and Shutterfly is particularly strong in this capability, even letting 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. York Photos shared galleries are little more than batches of thumbnails, and Nations Photo Lab doesn't get involved in online gallery sharing. Mobile Apps for Photo Printing The most popular camera these days is one that's always on you—your phone. And smartphones have come a long way in terms of image quality, with some capturing images with more than 20 megapixels of resolution. 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. York offers a very basic app that only lets you upload and order prints. Shutterfly adds the ability to order photo gifts, while Snapfish and Walgreens Photo's apps can import photos from social networks, perform some editing, and share photos with friends. Nations is the only service in this group with no mobile app. Delivering Your Photos If you want your pictures pronto, Walgreens Photo is the way to go. Look for upcoming reviews of Walmart Photo and CVS Photo, which also let you pick up prints locally. In our testing, Walgreens Photo didn't provide the best enlargements in terms of image quality, but its smaller prints were perfectly acceptable. 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 took an inordinate amount of time, and shipping costs for our order of 22 photos of various sizes ranged from $2.34 for York Photo Labs to $7 for Nations Photo Lab—but the reason for the difference was stark. York packaged the photos in a thin, standard large envelope, while the carefully protected Nations order arrived in multiple layers of cardboard and clear plastic envelopes. If you want faster delivery, most services offer second-day and overnight shipping, but keep in mind that the products still have to be produced, so that doesn't mean your photos will arrive the day after you order them, necessarily, even if you pay the $15 for overnight shipping. But it may mean your pictures arrive four days earlier. 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, this is the most important factor when ordering prints: How accurately the photos reproduce the image you shot. Most of the prints I received, especially at the smaller 4-by-6-inch size, revealed acceptable image quality. When you get to enlargements, however, the differences became far more apparent. In particular, we found that the Walgreens Photo prints exhibited discoloration and lost detail, while the Nations Photo Lab prints showed the best image quality. You can see the difference in this 8-by-10 mountain scene, where the sky in the Walgreens Photo picture has a pinkish and purplish tinge that wasn't in the original, and some cloud detail is lost to white. Images from Nations Photo Lab, on the other hand, look natural, and show the truest black in a portrait with a black backdrop. Nations is also the only service that uses the truly professional-quality Kodak Endura paper. Please don't hesitate to share your experiences with photo printing services in the comments below. To learn more, check out our collections of Quick Tips to Fix Your Bad Photos, Beyond-Basic Phototography 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. Nations Photo Lab Review MSRP: $0.28 at Pros: The best print quality of all the services we tested. Excellent delivery packaging. TIFF file support. Reasonable pricing. Cons: Web interface is less slick than some competitors. 40MB file size upload limit. No online gallery sharing.Bottom Line: It's not as well known as some competitors, but Nations Photo Lab delivered the best photo quality of all the services we've tested, and at reasonable prices.Read Review Pros: Fast printing. Basic online image editing. Grabs photos from social networks for printing. Online album sharing. Cons: Print quality and colors don't measure up to to the competition. More expensive than some competitors.Bottom Line: If you need your photos printed pronto, Walgreens offers a viable option, but it's not the cheapest service and the print quality isn't the best.Read Review Snapfish Review MSRP: $0.09 at Pros: Inexpensive. Good image quality. Well-designed, fast, modern web interface. Solid editing tools. Tons of print surface options including mugs, blankets, and much more. Online gallery sharing.Cons: Flimsy shipping packaging. Lacks TIFF support. No drag and drop from File Explorer.Bottom Line: Snapfish offers good image quality in its very affordable prints, plus a slick, modern website, and a wide array of gift options for your photos.Read Review AdoramaPix Review MSRP: $0.29 at Pros: Very good print quality on high-grade paper. Excellent website usability and features. Letterbox cropping and border options. Excellent packaging. TIFF and large files supported.Cons: Fewer printed gift options than competitors. Colors slightly washed out.Bottom Line: The AdoramaPix photo printing service boasts a superior web interface, the best packaging of any service we've tested, and very good print quality. Read Review Pros: Excellent print quality. Color and lighting correction. Money-back guarantee. Protective shipping. Includes mounting brackets. Cons: No cropping tool. Long delivery time.Bottom Line: Turn your digital photos into living room art with this high quality, affordable service that prints your photos on canvas and can even frame them for you. Read Review Pros: Decent print image quality. Online galleries for sharing. Lots of photo-printed gift options. Prints photo filename on back of paper. Imports photos from Facebook and Instagram. Good print packaging. Cons: Comparatively expensive. Weak online photo editing. Odd upload system.Bottom Line: Shutterfly offers a wealth of products upon which you can print your photos, and excels in packaging, but its site, image quality, and pricing are all mediocre. Read Review Pros: Good print quality. Easy-to-use website. Local pickup with same-day option. Wide selection of gift options.Cons: Expensive. Flimsy packaging, without separate sleeves for different size photos. Bottom Line: CVS costs more than most other photo printing services we've tested, but it does offer convenient local pickup and surprisingly high photo quality.Read Review Pros: Low prices. Decent editing tools. Acceptable print image quality. Lots of photo-printed gift options.Cons: Flimsy packaging. Slow website. Online sharing options are anemic. Lacks TIFF support.Bottom Line: York Photo Labs offers prints and printed gifts at low prices, but you can find services with better print quality, interfaces, packaging, and online photo sharing.Read Review Pros: Good picture quality and packaging. Online photo sharing. Online image editing.Cons: Clunky web interface. 10MB image file size limit. Long processing times. Exorbitant expediting fees.Bottom Line: RitzPix delivers good photo prints, decently packaged, at average prices, but it doesn't stand out from the crowd, and its web interface is mediocre.Read Review Pros: Low price. Decent web interface. Fast service with local pickup option. Online photo sharing.Cons: Subpar image quality and shipping packaging. No mobile photo-uploading app.Bottom Line: Walmart Photo offers a good web interface and low prices, but our testing shows that its print quality and packaging don't match those of its best competitors.Read Review

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