Nations Photo Lab may not have Snapfish or Shutterfly’s name recognition when it comes to photo printing services, but it certainly delivers the goods. Nations offers high-quality prints that arrive in excellent protective packaging in our testing. Though the company’s pricing is on the high side, it’s still quite reasonable, when compared with other services that use high-end paper and processes.
How Much Do Nations Photo Lab Prints Cost?
Nations charges more for the standard 4-by-6 print than most of the competition, at 32 cents each or 56 cents with color correction, though you do find special discounts far below those prices. Nations recommends using its color correction unless you calibrate your monitor with their specific ICC profiles. Some services, including Walmart (PCMag’s top choice for value prints) and York Photo Labs, charge only 9 cents for 4-by-6 photos. The 5-by-7s cost a reasonable $1.25 ($1.69 with color correction) and the 8-by-10s are $2.49/$3.25.
Only the prices charged by Editors’ Choice winners Printique and Mpix are comparable, but Nations charges the most among services we tested. The best deals on 5-by-7s and 8-by-10s are from Amazon Prints, which charges 58 cents and $1.79, respectively. Walmart Photo isn’t far behind, charging 69 cents for 5-by-7s.
Shipping via U.S. Postal Service First Class cost just $3.95 for my order of 24 4-by-6s, five 5-by-7s, and two 8-by-10s; UPS ground ($7), 2nd day ($15), or overnight ($30) are the other delivery options. If you visit Nations’ Maryland lab location, you can pick up your prints for free.
Cards and Gifts
Nations doesn’t only produce photo prints: You can order holiday cards, photo books, calendars, mugs, and home décor as well. Holiday cards start at $32.75 for a 25-pack, or $1.31 per card. The price decreases as your order quantity increases. You can also get Christmas stockings and tree ornaments with your photos printed on them. The most unusual photo gifts Nations offers are blankets, pillows, and dog tags. It’s a respectable selection, but it’s not quite as wide-ranging as Snapfish, which offers offbeat things like shower curtains and face masks with your photos on them.
Creating Orders With Nations Photo Lab
To start an order with Nations, as with any online photo printing service, you need to upload your pictures. Unfortunately, the service no longer lets you directly add photos from Facebook, Google Photos, Instagram, or other third-party cloud services, as Printique and Walmart Photo do. And as with most services of this type, you start by creating a new Gallery. Unlike Snapfish, and Shutterfly, Nations does support drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer. You can upload JPG and TIFF files, which is more than most services, which usually limit you to JPG and maybe PNG. TIFF support marks Nations as more professional, but the service doesn’t allow you to upload PNGs.
You can select multiple files to be uploaded at once, but there’s a maximum number of 400 photos per upload.
On the ordering page, Nations makes it a little harder to select multiple prints for the same image. The other services usually show selection boxes for the standard size selections—4-by-6, 5-by-7, 8-by-10—in which you can enter the number of prints of an image at each size. With Nations, you must select the photos, and then the size. After selecting them, you see a Review and Edit Crops window with all your selected images. This is a good thing—you don’t want Aunt Debbie’s head half cut off.
The service offers no photo-editing or enhancing tools at all, such as those offered by Snapfish. Still, you’re probably better off doing that stuff on your computer using an app like the free Windows Photos or the not-so-free Adobe Lightroom, which avails you of more options than online editing. There’s another issue with cropping: You can’t uncrop. That is, you can choose a subset of the image, but you can’t zoom out and make it smaller on the page. This is particularly problematic when you have a square image that you want to print on rectangular paper. Another problem is that if you choose a border, such as white or black, Nations doesn’t show you a preview of it with your image.
In the next and final step before ordering, you can choose from several mounting options, which cost significantly more than the standard prints—single-weight matboard costs $3.17 per print all the way up to 0.5-inch black gatorboard for $7.43. That’s more choice than Shutterfly, which only offers cardstock for larger-size prints. You can choose border options and black-and-white treatment on a per-photo basis.
When I went to check out and pay for my order, Nations offered upsells to pillows and metal print options for my pictures. But you can skip the offers with the Next button at the top of the window.
If you’re looking for a service with some online gallery-sharing capabilities, Nations is not for you. Amazon, Mpix, Snapfish, and Walgreens offer online sharing of your uploaded galleries, but if that’s a key functionality for you, you’re better off with a powerful online service, such as Flickr or SmugMug, which offer both public and private galleries.
The Photo Printing Results
My Nations photo order came back in double-layer cardboard shipping protection. Only Printique and Mpix provided sturdier packaging; Amazon Prints and RitzPix were the only vendors tested that used thin paper envelopes. The order took three days from ordering to delivery—better than the estimated six days for my shipping option. The photos were perfectly flat and printed on genuine Kodak Endura photographic paper. This was far more impressive than the curled, unbranded paper used by Walgreens, and Snapfish’s loose 8-by-10 in its mailing envelope.
More important is the actual print image quality. In the mountain landscape below, Nations revealed more detail in dark areas at the expense of detail in the sky. Target Photo lost the dark detail, and the CVS print is oversaturated, resulting in an artificial look. To my eyes, Mpix and Walmart Photo, both Editors’ Choices winners, produced the best balance. Printique and Nations produced very similar results.
In dark shots, Nations was more convincing. A black background in another Nations print was among the truest black renderings among tested services, with no color tinge. Snapfish and Shutterfly were each on a par for the same portrait, with less-deep black. The portrait below with a red hat shows the hat’s texture in the Nations print, which is lost in the oversaturated Amazon print.
The Best Photo Printing in the Nation?
Nations Photo Lab delivers high photographic quality in superior shipping packaging, though it costs more than the big consumer-targeted services such as Shutterfly and Snapfish. Our Editors’ Choice high-end photo-printing services are Printique and Mpix, both of which have more capable interfaces. On the value end of the spectrum, our Editors’ Choice winners are Snapfish and Walmart Photo.
