Good deal for April
Shutterbugs have lots of online options.
For the rest of the month, Snapfish is offering 50 free prints and a 20 percent discount on photo books to its customers, new and returning.
Snapfish, run by Hewlett-Packard, is an online photo storage and printshop. It offers inexpensive photo prints and items such as calenders and posters, and you can store unlimited photos for free. Well, almost free.
Cheap prints
There’s a small catch at Snapfish. If you want to store photos there indefinitely, you must buy something once a year. However, there is no minimum purchase price. Snapfish sells prints of your pictures for 9 cents, which is the best price I have seen out there.
Shutterfly will store your photos for free indefinitely, even if you don’t buy anything. But their photo print prices appear to bottom out at 10 cents apiece. You wouldn’t want to have to take out a payday loan to print your pictures.
Beware if you use EasyShare
The almost-free storage at Snapfish and free storage at Shutterfly are bad news for the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Kodak recently announced that customers must make a purchase by May 16 or their photos will be deleted.
Customers who use less than 2 gigabytes of space must purchase $4.99 worth of merchandise. Photographers who use more space have to spend $19.99 on the site in the next six weeks or the company will delete their photos from EasyShare.
A place to stash pics
You can order poster-sized versions of your favorite pictures.
So, in short, if you want to store your pictures and purchase prints with no pressure, it’s less expensive to stick with Snapfish or Shutterfly. Of course, if you don’t plan to buy prints of your photos and just need a place to store them, there are plenty of places online to stash them.
Most social networking sites allow you to store photos with your profile. For instance, Facebook lets you store unlimited photos forever.
PhotoShare benefits
Snapfish and sites like it also save money by eliminating the need for extra memory cards and storage devices for your photos. The cost of prints and other items are significantly less that what you normally find at printshops or drugstore photo printing kiosks.
This certainly beats buying an installing more memory or other storage space and shelling out for the fancy printer paper for pictures. Unless I’m putting together the mother of all scrapbooks, 9 cents a print is a really good deal, and who knows what pictures the goofballs are going to throw out in your average photo store?
I want to cancel photos I put on Snapfish inadvertently.