My Reviews of Online Photo Services

I am a big fan of online photo services. I have memberships at Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Photobucket, and we have a family photo album at aboutmybaby.com. All of these offer the opportunity to purchase prints.

Each of these sites has its perks and of course its downsides.

Snapfish:
Overall my favorite photo service. It allows you to upload boatloads of photos, and as long as you place an order once a year, they will keep your photos forever. Prints are very cheap, and at 9 cents apiece for 4x6 prints, cost significantly less than other sites. They also offer the option to either leave digital photos in their original size/format or crop to fit a 4x6 print size. Shipping is reasonable. They offer in store pickup at Walgreens and various grocery stores, though that tends to up the price per print because you end up paying whatever the store charges instead of the Snapfish rate. Snapfish also will process film for substantially less than a grocery store, and the quality is good. They offer a variety of photobooks, calendars, and other memorabilia for anyone interested in those kinds of things. Their photo cards and postcards are very reasonably priced and print up very nicely. The site is quite secure, and nobody can view your photos unless you share the album with them via email. Another bonus? eBates offers 10% cash back! A downside is that Snapfish does require membership to view photos in an album, so it makes sharing difficult if you have family members (like I do) who don't like to sign up for things. They have also changed their upload software so you must select individual files rather than a group of them to upload, so it takes longer to upload to the site than it used to.
Current coupons:
New customers get 50 free 4x6 prints

Shutterfly:
This photo service is nice in that no account is required to view someone's album or shared photos. They also offer free things (photo books, poster prints, etc) on a fairly regular basis. Uploading to their site is about the same as to Snapfish. However, their prints start at 15 cents apiece for a 4x6 print, and as far as I recall from ordering with them, they do not automatically offer the option of whether or not to crop digital photos to fit the 4x6 size (I think either all the pictures were cropped, or none of them were, so they then didn't fit into a 4x6 frame correctly). Making posters and photobooks with Shutterfly is easy and I really liked the variety of borders, covers, formats, etc that they offered. Shipping is reasonable. Also, if saving images from an album to your computer, they end up with a funny white border that you can't get rid of.

Current Coupons:
New members get 50 free 4x6 prints and free standard shipping on their first order
Free shipping on orders of $50+ with code SHIP50

Photobucket:
I only use this site for online photo hosting to post images in forums. It allows you to upload other formats than .jpg images, which neither of the other sites do as far as I can determine. Print cost for a 4x6 is the same as through Shutterfly, but prints and photobooks, etc are processed through a site called Qoop with which I have no experience. You can also order prints for pickup at Target for 20 cents apiece.

AboutMyBaby.com:
This is more an online album and journal (or blog, even) than a photosharing website, but you can share photos and videos with friends and family easily. I have our site password protected, and the people I have invited to view it have the password. The site will email people who've chosen to be notified when you update it, and they can order prints of photos that they want, also through Qoop like Photobucket. You can also upload video to this site. I love that feature. It takes a while to process, but once uploaded the videos are easy to view. Photos can be uploaded en masse, which is also quite appealing to me.