I have been testing photo printers for almost 20 years, first while on staff at Popular Photography, then at CNET, then at Popular Photography again, and now at Wirecutter.

I also served as the senior technical editor for Popular Photography for its last decade in print and was in charge of maintaining and updating its testing procedures. During that time I tested most of the cameras covered by the magazine. I oversaw various feature stories about online printing and kept up to date on the equipment used for commercial photo printing by services of all sizes.

Photos are more ubiquitous in our lives now than ever in human history. And they’re commonly shared digitally through texts, emails, or social media. But often, the ones that make the most indelible impression on us are the ones that we choose to print and hang on a wall or stand on a desk or bookcase.

If you want to make a print of a photo that’s special to you, the best option is an online print service. Our recommendation lets you easily upload your image, pick the kind of paper you want (and maybe even a frame), and have the whole thing made into a premium package that you can hang on your wall when it arrives. You won’t have to worry about keeping ink and paper on hand, and you won’t have to learn how to operate annoying and unreliable machinery.

Sure, serious photographers often want to print their own images because they want the control to make them into the perfect objects they intend them to be. Doing that means dedicating desk space and spending upwards of $800 on a specialized printer like our photo-printer pick. While I am one of those people, I don’t think that’s the best way for most people to make a photo print.

It’s also convenient, when sending a gift, to have the printing service handle most of the logistical aspects of shipping framed photos. Online photo printing services can send your professionally finished photo directly to your recipient, relieving you of the need to frame it yourself and package it safely for shipping.

Wirecutter has been recommending online photo printing services since 2016. From the beginning, our goal has been to point you toward convenient, easy-to-use options that deliver high-quality prints to your home and let you choose from a variety of print sizes and papers.

We shied away from choosing solely based on price—cheap photo prints often look and feel cheap, and we want you to feel confident that you’ll get a print you can share with others and that will look good in your, or their, home.

Also, print services make it difficult to pinpoint pricing because they regularly offer discounts and promotions, and both print and shipping costs typically vary. (It’s worth signing up with an email, possibly one that you use just for online shopping, where you won’t mind receiving emails with promo codes somewhat regularly.)

We ruled out services from big-box stores that require membership, such as Costco and Sam’s Club, because we wanted a recommendation that anyone can use (plus Costco currently outsources its service to Shutterfly). We also ruled out pharmacies and stores such as CVS and Office Depot, where in-person pickup is often required.

For our initial round of testing, we considered 20 different services. After looking at their user interfaces, print choices, and shipping options, we narrowed that down to 10 that we ordered from to compare the results. In subsequent years, we’ve ordered additional prints to test new options and features, eventually narrowing that down to one.

For our first round of testing, we sent the same 20 images—including landscapes, people with a range of skin tones, low-light images, scenes with saturated colors, and both neutral and tinted black-and-white photos—to all the services we tested.

We ordered prints in 4-by-6, 5-by-5, 8-by-10, and 11-by-14 sizes, compared them to reference prints we made on our pick for the best photo printer (the Epson SureColor P600 at the time), and conducted a test panel of several Wirecutter colleagues with varying levels of photography experience. The panelists identified their top two choices and noted their least-favorite prints when presented with six sets of prints made from identical image files.

In our most recent round of testing in 2023, we added 8-by-8 and 11-by-17 sizes and compared the results to those of past years.

Top pick

Nations Photo Lab

Pleasing prints and an option for gift givers

This print lab offers the best combination of quality, price, options, and service, delivering good-looking prints in secure packaging.

Buying Options

Buy from Nations Photo Lab

Nations Photo Lab lets you upload images easily from both a computer and a mobile device, has a simple-to-use interface, creates prints with accurate-looking colors in a timely fashion, and packages them securely so that they’ll arrive at your home undamaged.

Uploading is as easy, pricing is as clear, and configuring your print order is as simple as you’ll find in any online print service. After you’ve uploaded your photos, drop-down menus let you select the sizes and paper type you want, with the prices listed as you choose.

As you build your order, you can reconfigure the paper types; add options for mounting on foamcore, gatorboard, matboard, or styrene; and select sizes ranging from pre-perforated sets of eight wallet-size images up to 30-by-45-inch prints, though not all sizes are available for all paper options. For example, you can get a 30-by-45 only in a luster finish, but the other papers go as large as 20 by 40 inches, and metal prints are limited to 24 by 36 inches.

Our prints arrived on time. Nations has a variety of options for shipping and delivers on its promised turnaround times. For previous orders we’ve selected expedited service, and in those cases it printed and shipped our order the same day, and we received them in New York City the following day. Most recently we selected free economy shipping, and we received our order in nine days, one day less than the stated 10-day promise.

The prints look great. Prints we received from Nations showed plenty of detail, even with high-resolution images that contain a stunning amount of detail. They were better than, or as good as, any of the prints we’ve ordered from competing services. Colors look accurate to life and match the source images in terms of contrast, including across the full range of skin tones we included. If you’re worried about the files you uploaded, Nations offers color correction for a very small fee so your casual snapshots can look their best.

When we held our test panel, participants consistently ranked Nations among the top. We have seen consistently good results every time we’ve ordered from them.

Their standard packaging is the most secure we’ve seen for shipped prints. Our prints arrived in a 21-by-17-by-1-inch box. The size of the outer packaging will likely vary based on the largest-size print you include in your order, but inside you’ll find windowed paper envelopes of prints you chose. Larger sizes come in clear sleeves that are sandwiched inside cardboard. Smaller envelopes are held to the cardboard holding larger prints with plastic wrap, creating one unit inside the main box so nothing moves around during shipping. The corners of our prints arrived in perfect condition. Some competitors’ prints shifted in transit, so corners were damaged.

Gift packaging is available. Whether you want to send prints to loved ones or to clients, Nations will let you ship prints in gift boxes, complete with ribbon, with their Boutique Packaging option, which costs an extra $6.84 as of this writing. For $17.75 more you can create Custom Presentation Boxes, and add images or a logo for a special or professional look.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

They should add “odd” print sizes that match the 4:3 aspect ratio. If an image file’s aspect ratio doesn’t match the print size you select, Nations will automatically crop the image, usually from the top and bottom, to fit the paper. If you’re picky about cropping, you’ll have to crop before you upload, or use image-editing software to add blank white edges to the image file if you want the whole image printed.

If Nations added odd sizes, such as 4 by 5.3 inches, you could get your whole image without any fuss. Of course, most paper suppliers don’t offer such sizes, so it’d add a lot of complication for Nations, but it’s still irksome that this remains a problem when digital images in these aspect ratios have been around for decades now.

The ROES (Remote Order Entry System) software is Java-based. Nations offers this app mostly for professionals to place bulk orders, but it’s also a nice alternate interface for technically adept photographers. Because the software is Java-based, to use it you may have to install Java first, and for security purposes, you’ll want to make sure that your version of Java is up to date. ROES has a nice interface, though, and it will automatically add white edges to images that don’t fit neatly on the paper sizes offered by Nations.

We’d like Nations to let you print metadata on the back of photos. It might seem antiquated to have the date printed on the back of your photo, but it’s also a convenient way to keep track of when a photo was taken (assuming you have the date and time set properly in your camera).

There’s also a wealth of info in metadata, such as camera and lens model numbers, camera settings that can be useful for budding photographers, and sometimes even location data.

It’d be nice to be able to have Nations print (at least some of) this data on the back of your photo, even if it only turns out to be useful when your kids or grandkids look through your prints in the distant future. Some services, such as Shutterfly, let you add a message on the back of your print if you choose.

Printique is a previous runner-up pick in this guide. And while Printique’s print quality and pricing is on a par with those of Nations, we liked the Nations image-upload and order processes better than Printique’s.

Mpix is one of the most popular photo services, with an app that lets you order photos directly from your smartphone. However, our panelists ranked Mpix’s photos as their least-favorite choice, and we were disappointed by its inability to print smartphone photos without significant cropping.

If you create images with careful attention to composition, this forced cropping is likely a dealbreaker. EZprints and RitzPix, for example, offer a smartphone-friendly print size at a 4:3 aspect ratio, and Printique and Nations Photo Lab give you the option to print your image uncropped, no matter the aspect-ratio mismatch. As of this writing, Mpix provides neither of those options.

Bay Photo offers small print sizes optimized for smartphone photos, along with sturdy packaging, but in our tests its print output was decidedly middling. In our unlabeled print test, participants rarely made it a first or last choice in side-by-side comparisons with our other contenders, usually slotting it as a reasonable second choice.

No other service we tested offers lower prices than Snapfish, but it yielded some of the most disappointing results. The 8-by-10 and 4-by-6 prints suffered from harsh contrast (meaning fewer details in shadows and highlights), and our portrait pics had noticeably orangish skin tones. We weren’t pleased with the packaging, either: Smaller prints shipped in a thin cardboard mailing envelope with no additional padding to protect against rough handling. The 11-by-14 print shipped in a sufficiently thick tube, but no padding was placed inside to protect the print’s edges from the tube’s end caps, resulting in a bent print, shown below.

A print from RitzPix arrived damaged, as well. The company shipped our 11-by-14 print in a flat envelope sandwiched between thin sheets of backing board (the kind you see in the back of cheap photo frames). Because the shipping envelope was only marginally larger than the 11-by-14 photo, the print was dinged in the corner when the package was crushed during shipping. RitzPix could have prevented the damage by simply using a larger envelope, or better yet, a box, as several other shops did. The inadequate packaging was especially disappointing given that the company billed us a whopping $14.95 for shipping, more than twice the average of the other shops we ordered from.

EZprints, like Snapfish, was one of the few services whose prints stood out as uncommonly poor. Every print had a hazy, washed-out appearance, as if covered by a veil. These were the least-sharp photos of the bunch, and clear areas of tone had a somewhat mottled appearance.

Our order from Shutterfly was the second most expensive in our tests, and the print quality was average at best. Our biggest complaint was about the packaging. The small prints came in a thin, flat envelope, and the 11-by-14 came in a tube, resulting in a curled print that would need flattening before display. (Note: The quickest way to uncurl a print is to wrap it around a wide-diameter tube in the opposite direction of the original curl and roll it up. It can take some practice to do this without accidentally creasing or creating ripple marks in the print, however. A much safer approach is to lay the prints flat under some weight for a day or two.)

Zazzle lets you make photo prints but has a user interface designed for single-order-at-a-time jobs and has limited paper options. The process of choosing a print size involves dragging each image individually on its own order page over a print-size template. That’s far too tedious to make even a handful of separate prints.

Winkflash has a steady stream of very negative reviews. In addition to many customers losing access to their photos hosted on the company’s servers because of a change in ownership, many users have noted problems contacting customer service. The only customer support available is via a web form—there’s no phone number or even an email option. These issues made Winkflash an easy dismissal.

FreePrints, as its name suggests, lets you get up to 1,000 4-by-6 prints per year without charge, though you do pay for shipping. Judging from the limited information on its single-page website, you must do everything via a phone app. With virtually no information provided online about the company, the prints, or the order process, we fall back on the maxim, “If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.”

Amazon Prints offers 4-by-6 prints at 17¢ each, though it used to match low-cost rivals like Snapfish, which makes them for 9¢. Amazon Prime members already using the company’s Prime Photos service to store their pics can order prints of those images directly. Amazon’s order process was dead simple. Print quality fell toward the middle of the pack—certainly not the best that we saw (skin tones skewed toward orange), but not the worst. The photos arrived within six business days. We were disappointed in the packaging, which consisted of a flat mailer with two sheets of thin cardboard inside; not surprisingly, one of the prints arrived with a corner ding.

Walmart offers a 4-by-5.3-inch option, which will let you print a smartphone’s 4:3 aspect ratio image without cropping, but its overall selection of print sizes isn’t nearly as extensive as those from our pick.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.