These days, Amazon will sell you almost anything you can buy, and photo prints are no exception. Though photo printing doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the retail behemoth—appearing all the way down as the 30th link on the site’s navigation panel—it nevertheless comprises a well-rounded offering from Amazon. As with the company’s AmazonBasics line, prices are low, and the quality is decent, if inconsistent. The site’s interface could use work, however, and the packaging for our test prints didn’t impress us.
How Much Do Amazon Prints Cost?
Most people reading this will already have an Amazon account login, and that’s all you need to get started with Amazon Prints. As a refresher, all that requires is an email address—which the service will verify—and a password. You don’t need to enter payment or credit card info until you pull the purchase trigger. Glossy or matte 4-by-6 (or 4-by-5.3) prints start at a reasonable 15 cents each. 5-by-7 prints cost just 58 cents each, and 8-by-10s cost $1.79 per shot. Those last two prices are lower than any other services charge for those sizes.
For 4-by-6s, however, you’ll pay less at Snapfish, Walmart Photo, and York Photo Labs, which all charge just 9 cents per print. Nations Photo Lab has the priciest entry-level for this size, at 32 cents per pic.
Photo Gifts and Cards
As you might expect from the all-encompassing seller of everything, Amazon goes beyond mere prints with a selection of photo printing projects, but it’s surprisingly limited compared with other services like Shutterfly and RitzPix. You can get the standard mugs, wall art, calendars, and photo books, along with a couple more-offbeat options like mouse pads and blankets. But the competitors go much further, offering clothing, puzzles, pet bowls, and even shower curtains graced with your photos.
Amazon offers holiday cards emblazoned with your family photos, but the choices are far more limited than with competitors like Walmart Photo: The e-tailer only offers flat cards, priced at 99 cents each at the 5-by-7 size. Other providers offer folding cards, along with premium options like foil printing and linen cardstock. Walmart charges only 67 cents for 5-by-7 flat cards, and $1.28 for folding cards.
Uploading Your Photos
In order to use Amazon Prints, you also have to use Amazon Photos, since that’s where Prints gets your images. Amazon Photos gives you 5GB free online storage, and a Prime subscription gets you unlimited photo storage and free shipping. You can only print JPG and PNG format image files. Some services, including Nations Photo Lab and Printique (formerly AdoramaPix), also let you add more-detailed TIFF files. You also cannot directly use your Facebook or Instagram photos with Amazon—as several services, including Printique and Target Photo, let you do.
Amazon has cleaned up the confusion between its Prints and Photos options for buying printed photographs since our last review. The two different interfaces for ordering photo prints have been collapsed into one. The process now always takes you through your uploaded Amazon Photos collection.
Once you select photos, you can change the number of prints you want, and the order page shows you if and where any of your images will be cut off by the aspect ratio you chose. Amazon Prints marks a size in the options page as Best fit, which won’t crop your photos. Unlike other services that offer a convenient single page for adding sizes to all photos in order, Amazon Prints can only do so one image at a time (see screenshot above).
You can zoom an image to crop the print, but you can’t zoom out to add empty space for a photo that’s been cropped by the size you chose. What’s more, there are no imaging tools at all—several competitors include online tools for adjusting a photo’s lighting and color.
Shipping options are less speedy than you might expect for Amazon: The included Prime shipping option takes a full seven days. If you’re not a Prime member, you pay $5.85 for the same time window, with a slower $3.15 option available. For comparison, Nations Photo Lab‘s lowest shipping price for our order was $3.95, and Printique’s is $6.95. Walmart charges $4 for seven-day delivery and $7.99 for four-day. RitzPix offers a very low-cost $2.99 ground shipping option, if you can wait the 10 to 12 business days.
Of course, if you need your pictures (and even holiday cards) pronto, some photo printing services same-day pickup service, though the prices go up for these options. Even though Amazon now has some physical store and locker locations, you can’t pick up your Amazon Prints photo orders at those the way you can when you print with CVS, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart Photo. As you’d expect, you can’t use PayPal to check out, but you probably already have a credit card stored at the shopping titan in any case.
Photo Printing Options
Unlike some photo printing services, Amazon doesn’t offer any photo retouching, optimization, filters, or effects, as Mpix and Nations Photo Lab do. There’s no wallet-size prints option. One option it does offer is Pearl Prints. These, according to the site, have “a unique, high-gloss, reflective quality that’s almost iridescent, thanks to mica crystals embedded in the paper itself.”
When you choose a specialty product like aluminum or wood panel prints, you get a layout-design interface that lets you add multiple photos to the panel and arrange them to taste. You also get background texture choices, text overlays, and clip art options for holidays and special occasions. Other printed gift choices include ornaments, coffee mugs, blankets, and mouse pads.
Amazon Photo’s Mobile Apps
Amazon Prints, available as an Android app and iOS app, supports both online photo storage (including automatic photo uploading from your phone camera) and print ordering. The app has a Prints button at the top, from which you can not only order standard glossy and matte prints, but also decorative items such as the sort of canvas wall décor you might expect from CanvasPop, as well as prints on metal. You don’t get quite the selection of printing options you get on the desktop website, though. For example, cards, mugs and photo books don’t appear.
The app also offers album organization and private messenger-like group sharing. Using AI wizardry, it will find all the faces in your photo set and let you name them. It can also identify objects in photos, such as roads, hats, and cars, gathering all matching photos so you can see them at once.
The Results: Quality and Delivery
Happily, our oder arrived much faster than the estimated delivery dates on the checkout page: It took just three business days compared with the checkout page’s estimated two weeks.
For photo services, packaging counts, and Amazon Prints was just about at the bottom of all the services we tested in terms of delivery packaging, alongside York Photo Labs. This is evident from the photo above, where Amazon Prints’ packaging for our order is leftmost. Amazon Prints was the only service that used soft envelopes. Printique and Mpix actually use hard cardboard boxes for the same order size.
Print quality, though, is probably the most important factor in choosing a photo printing service. The service uses Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, which is quite good, but not as top-quality as the professional-level Kodak Endura paper used by Printique, Mpix, and Nations Photo Lab. The color and sharpness in our test prints, however, were mostly good.
The service excelled on two of our test photos, a distant mountain scene and a cityscape (above).
One print of the portrait with the red hat was oversaturated to the point that the felt texture was lost in the hat. Another test of Amazon using the same photo was washed out, with the skin tones too light (shown in the second row above).
Amazon Prints Delivers
As with so many of the company’s other services, Amazon’s photo printing delivers good quality at a low price. The two main drawbacks are its flimsy shipping packaging and inconsistent printing results. The ordering interface works, but it isn’t as full-featured and well-designed as that of Snapfish and Walmart Photo, our budget Editors’ Choice photo printing services. Our high-end Editors’ Choice winners are Printique and Mpix, which offer premium paper and the sturdiest shipment packaging.
