Review: Snapfish

High-street chain Jessops uses Snapfish for its online photo printing, and the tie-in means that you can collect photo books from the local Jessops store if you prefer, rather than waiting to have it posted.

Like the Kodak and PhotoBox sites, the Snapfish site requires a one-time free registration. It takes just a few moments, the questions are kept to a minimum and your account is ready straight away.

It’s then possible to upload photos to Snapfish galleries and, from there, arrange them in photo books as required.

The upload software is installed quickly and lets you choose images and folders from your hard disk. A progress bar shows how the upload is progressing; and ours was fast and trouble-free. However, it did appear to stall right at the end indicating a complete transfer but with one picture still to go.

There were eight different cover designs to choose from, but inside the choices were more limited. The pages are printed on plain white paper, and while you can vary
the layout for individual pages, the only other choice was single-sided versus double-sided printing and captions or no captions.

Page layouts can be chosen as you go along and photos added manually by dragging them from a filmstrip underneath the page display. There was no autofill option, but in practice we think it’s easier just to fill the pages manually.

Choosing layouts is easy – icons run down the side of the pages to show you what they look
like and from here you can click on the one you want. The caption boxes initially display the photo filenames and you just type over them.

There’s not much room, and where the layout includes three or four pictures, there’s only space below each one for a handful of words.

This was one of the easiest sites to use and our photo book was ready to go in just a few minutes. However, things went downhill after that. Snapfish quotes delivery times of seven to nine working days.

After seven days – five of them working – we fired off an email to the site’s inquiries address, and received an automated reply promising a human reply within 24 hours. Four days later, we did get an email from a human, but they said they had forwarded the mail onto a colleague.

Nine days after placing the order, we had to abandon our anonymity and ask Snapfish’s PR company to intervene so that we could get the book in time for our comparisons. The explanation given was that we had ordered at the end of a very successful promotion and the delay was caused by a changeover in the product lines.

We suspect our cover was produced hurriedly and doesn’t reflect the standard product, but inside the Snapfish book was very good. The borderless pages were particularly impressive. More space for longer captions (or a smaller typeface) would be an improvement, though. The colour rendition was excellent but, as we noted with the other books, the definition and smoothness doesn’t quite match up to what you might expect from a good inkjet.

This article is part of a group test of photo albums.
See also:
BonusPrint
Kodak EasyShare Gallery
PhotoBox
Choose the best imge format
Go local
Photo Albums
A table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above.

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