Where do you guys get your photos printed? I was so excited to pick up my prints from my recent Switzerland trip from Walgreens until I saw they chopped off the top of the Matterhorn in multiple pictures!!!! ☹ Also, the pictures look better on my iphone than the prints.
I don’t want to have to do anything other than use an app to send my files somewhere and have the prints sent to me.
Would appreciate any recommendations. Thanks!!!!
Personally, I print my photos at home (on a very nice, very expensive and somewhat finicky printer), but I am not a typical photo consumer. I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to photos. Sounds like you want a one-click-and-forget-it solution.
Getting an exact match (or even something close) between the image you see on a screen and the same image printed on a piece of paper is a very difficult task, and one that has posed (and continues to pose) a lot of technical challenges. On your screen, an image is made up of light (literally, it's lit up). On a piece of paper, the image you see is created by laying down ink (or ink-like stuff), and the colors you perceive result from light bouncing off that paper and ink, with some wavelengths (colors) being absorbed or reflected, to your eye. Add to that there are some colors that are nearly or completely impossible to reproduce in prints, unless you use fancy/complex (=expensive) technologies (for example, grass-green and oranges are particularly tricky). From a technology standpoint, this is a very, very difficult problem to solve. There are ways to do it, but most are expensive and/or may require human judgement. It's a miracle that cheap "drug store" snapshots turn out as well as they do. If it's any consolation, things have gotten much better with this in recent years. But it's still tricky.
Another problem is the "shape" of your photos. If you simply send your images off to someplace and tell them "just print them", you may have some compromises. It's a competitive business (there are plenty of places that can/will do this) but unless you are willing to pay to have some human actually look at them and -- more importantly -- make (good) decisions (eg: don't cut off the top of a mountain, don't cut off someone's head) you will be at the mercy of the algorithms that were built into whatever system they are running. Photo printing systems are largely automated -- they need to be, to keep the costs down. Consumers demand cheap photos, and are not willing to pay for what it takes to have a skilled, attentive technician make judgement calls and figure out what's best. So you get a headless Matterhorn or family member. Consider how much you paid for those prints. You can take your images to a more upscale place and they will print them however you want (you'll need to be very specific) , but it'll be (a lot) more expensive.
You can probably find some reasonable medium (I'm sure others will chime in) but you will need to keep in mind when shooting your photos that they will be printed by robots. That means you better stick to standard aspect ratios (shapes). Software will allow you to create/edit photos to any dimensions (and modern cameras will allow you to specify all sorts of options for dimensions, some of which will not match the size of the paper they'll print on...that will result in either things being cut off, or large "blank" areas of white).
You need to pay attention to what options you select when shooting your photos, and when editing them (if you do) and when setting up your print requests. Just like when shopping for flights, "be careful what you ask for"...if you just say "I want it cheap" you'll get something like that, but it may not match what you really wanted.
Hope some of that helps a bit.
I use Shutterfly.
Also consider, the photos might not be as "good" or well composed as you think, since you're looking at them on a phone.
Try several online vendors (I think even Google will do it) and see how they come out.
Could the OP change the "outcome", by doing a bit of cropping on the iPhone?
Sure. But "cropping" can also make things worse.
The issue with stuff getting "cut off" is (usually) a mis-match between the aspect ratio ("shape" or dimensions) of the image and the paper it's going to be printed on.
Look at the shape of the screen (or the shape of the image) on your phone. That's (sometimes) not the shape of traditional photo prints. If your Matterhorn (or your friend's head) gets cut off, there's only a few reasonable explanations:
1 or 2 is highly likely.
You can "crop" an image into any aspect ratio. Mass-market photo printers are going to have just a few (maybe only one or two) options for print "size". The features of even the simplest photo app are incredibly powerful. You know what Spiderman says about great power...
David, I really appreciate the detailed reply. I’m new to photography and unfamiliar with the printing process. It seems my expectations were unrealistic as I assumed the photos would look like they do on my phone. Your explanation makes perfect sense and explains why my prints turned out as they did. I’ll have to look into some other options and maybe try a few different places.
MHA, thanks for the recommendation.
Phred, in my mind, my photos are National Geographic quality. 😊 I really did get some good ones.
I would also suggest sending a few shots to Shutterfly and see what the results are. I create photo-books with Shutterfly and the quality of the photos is really good. I am also an amateur photographer and print my own work at home on a fairly pricey printer and what David says is true. What you see on your IPhone screen or computer monitor is not what you are going to get. Printing photos to match what you see on the screen is really difficult. It usually takes me 10 proofs to get the color the way I want it on my final print.
I've had the best experiences with Shutterfly. I used to have really good results with an HP Photosmart printer way back in the 2000's but it's 4th cartridge (for grays) became obsolete. I haven't liked any of the prints I've made from subsequent printers. Shutterfly fixed that problem. I should mention that the books I've printed at Shutterfly seem to lose details that aren't lost in the prints they produce.
Another vote for Shutterfly. The quality is much better than what I used to get from the drugstore.
Yes, Photoshop, Lightroom and other image editing apps can do miraculous things (I worked in software development, including on those very apps, for many years...I'm using them right now on my other monitor). Anyone can use such tools to adjust (and even "fix") your photos, you can make them much better, and much worse, too, and you can make them surreal or impossible to print, if you twist the wrong knobs, press the wrong buttons, or simply use them too much (hint: most photos you see online these days look nothing like the reality they captured, because many people don't exercise some restraint when using these powerful tools...beware the images you see on most travel websites!). My spouse has stopped showing me cool-looking places from her social media feeds, because all I can do is point at the screen and do my best Elaine Benes: "Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake!"
The good news is that everyone now has incredibly powerful options, right in their pockets (be careful with how you use that power...) and cheap, quick, readily available prints that are (usually) very, very good. Take a look at old photos that someone spend a forture to shoot and print, and compare those to what you can get now for almost nothing. There are plenty of services worth trying, experiment a bit and find one that works for you. Even the cheap-o drugstore snapshots usually look pretty damn good, all things considered. Just be careful about your expectations.
PS: The Canon Pixma Pro series of printers have worked very nicely for me, printing high quality photos (even large ones), suitable for framing as they say (well, assuming your photos are frame-worthy). Not exactly cheap, and certainly hard-to-justify overkill for most folks. YOLO.
Thanks for the replies everyone!! I will definitely give Shutterfly a try and lower my expectations.
Hi Carrie, I use Walgreens Photo all the time. Download your photos to a laptop and you can crop and edit them until they’re just the way you want them. We make photo books and coffee mugs for all our trips and they turn out great. If you’re not happy with the quality, return them to the store or call the online number.
@David “beware the images you see on most travel websites!” So true. Travel instagrammers always seem to have beautiful blue skies with white puffy clouds in their photos. They are probably using the sky replacement tool. So many ways to fake things these days.
Carrie, I make my photobooks with Sutterfly and love them. You can see them if you look under my profile. The books seem very high quality. I only use Shutterfly to print my books, not to make them. For that, I use My Memories Suite a very easy to learn scrapbook program.
Donna, I couldn’t transfer my photos to my laptop. According to the tech guy at my company, the laptop doesn’t recognize the iphone as an external storage drive. He said my best bet was installing a photo program, which I'm trying to avoid.
Tammy, I will check out the photo books as I definitely intend to make one of those. A very big one. 😊
@Mary - Yes, "Sky Replacement" is actually a thing. In fact, it has become just one prominent "feature" in the escalating "arms race" competition between major photo editing apps: "Our Sky Replacement is not just pretty, it's AI-driven, and it's based on deep analysis of trillions of photos of real skies, so it's much more powerful than the other guy's pitiful Sky Replacement feature."
Insta and other social media does seem to be the worst for that (surprise! what else would you expect when you monetize clicks?), but it doesn't end there. Virtually every photo online (or in print) has been adjusted and tweaked to some extent. That's not necessarily a bad thing – I fiddle with my photos to make them look better, too, but I stop short of swapping out things as big as the sky. The key to photo editing is self-restraint: the tools won't stop you from turning your pictures into a comical, trippy, surreal mess, but if you want things to have any resemblance to reality (and credibility), it requires a degree of self-control that seems to be increasingly rare, and a light touch on the "auto-enhance" buttons.
Alas, the trend is for apps and devices to just go ahead and "turn the pretty up to 12" without even asking you. Whether you realize it or not, your phone automatically cranks up your photos for you (because that's what people like), so with each new phone release, it seems the knobs turn up the enhancement settings a little bit higher each time. I can (and do) look at a big bunch of photos taken over the past few years, and I can immediately pick out the pictures that were taken with my spouse's latest iPhone, and see a similar change in the overall look of her photos when she upgrade the previous time.
Eventually, I think everyone's photos are going to look completely perfect (and completely unrealistic) because they will all be geo-referenced and matched up with an existing database of photos of the same place taken from the same vantage point under perfect conditions (a perfect deep blue sky, with a few high wispy clouds, no crowds in front of the Eiffel Tower, just thin, attractive models that look creepily like you...).
Then there will be no need to travel anymore, since all the pictures will already have been taken and custom-synthesized for you, and all you'll need to do is to just google "me + Eiffel Tower from Trocadero, 6 pm on a Sunday in May + man in a beret with a baguette riding by on a red bicycle in background." That's when it'll be time to sell all your stock in RSE.
If all else fails, you can email the best of the photos to yourself. Then open on your laptop, and edit there It would be tedious to do a lot.
There is a company I use called Mpix that pros use to print high quality custom prints if you decide you want one blown up to a bigger framable size.
Hi Carrie, if you have a few favorite photos, maybe you can just email them to yourself and pick them up on the laptop. I have a PC (not Apple) computer, but I often airdrop photos from my phone to my I-pad. There's also a "lightening" plug you can use to quickly download things. Good luck!
Sky replacement??? Wow, there really is a lot I don’t know. The only thing I know how to do is zoom in and out.
periscope, stan, and donna, I appreciate the suggestions. I will give those a try tomorrow.
And stan, I think I will send a few photos to Mpix in addition to Shutterfly. I really do think I have some good ones. Although David now has me thinking it might just be the phone working it’s magic.
I use Shutterfly too, and love making photo books on their website with my shots. Play around with it on their website and see what you think. Having a few photos here and there is nice, but making a book of your trip is even nicer. They have templates you can drop pictures into, and add your own pages here and there for a bit more personalization.
A thought (or two) from someone who has not sent photos from a phone to be printed, but was there a a choice on the Walgreens site between 'portrait' or 'landscape' orientation?
I have yet to photo the Matterhorn, but suspect I would do so with the camera in a vertical orientation. Perhaps that may explain the decapitation?
As for the quality, what MB setting were you using when you took the photo? A low MB setting to maximize the number of photos you could take or a high MB setting to have better quality?
Between 2002 and 2010 I use to take those Fuji film disposable cameras on my trips. Those photos still look sharper than some newer ones I took with a camera phone from 2013 - 2017. Finally I ended buying a real camera, a Nikon. But yeah I always edit them before having prints made because of a similar bad experience with Walgreens processing.
I only use Walgreens photo when I don't care a lot about the quality of the pictures. In the twin cities we have a camera/photography store (National Camera) that does excellent processing, it just happens to be on the other side of the metropolitan area. The processing cost is also less than Walgreens.
When you deal with Walgreens, you have the ability to change the orientation from landscape/portrait and also crop it when you are submitting the photo. If its not cropped the way you cropped it, have them redo it. I've never had any issues when I've had photos reprinted. I'm not sure if it's the Walgreen's equipment or their supplies, but the last time I submitted photos they weren't all the great, but I needed the prints for a project. What I will say, the staff in my store is polite and they do their best to help. I also would guess they've had very little training, if any.
I have the new iPhone 13 and the pix have come out amazing. Sometimes I crop them, like when a guy with a bright orange shirt gets in the corner. I do usually lighten them up a bit, but I feel that doing so brings them into the reality of what I'm actually seeing.
I use Costco photo and make the Costco 12x 12" Lie-flat photo books. Takes a bit of time, but I know the program, and I have fun now with backgrounds and adding various frames. Most of my photo books usually have 300-400 pix , 70 pages, and runs about $70-80.00. I like the Travel-themed Album that Costco has, so all my travel pix books on the shelf match!
I usually print one or two of my travel pix in a 16"x20" metal print or canvas print. I am now leaning toward the canvas prints, because my house has many windows, so glare isn't a factor on the pix. I have a collage wall, and swap out older pix with more recent ones.
Carrie, I wonder if the comment made regarding portrait and landscape mode is the answer to your problem? Would be nice to find a simple solution.
Good luck!
David, many thanks for the mini-tutorial on printing and editing. Very interesting!!
“My spouse has stopped showing me cool-looking places from her social media feeds, because all I can do is point at the screen and do my best Elaine Benes: "Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake!"”
And, laughing, thanks for the ear-worm.
Thanks again everyone!! This has been very helpful and informative.
I am using the camera on my iphone 13 mini. I haven’t changed anything so am just using the factory settings. I don’t recall an option for portrait or landscape on the Walgreens site.
Regarding getting the photos on my laptop, I think the issue might be that my work computer is just not going to let me transfer the pictures from my phone to the laptop. I know how to do it, but get an error message about permissions. It’s company property and there’s certain things we're not able to have on the computer, like itunes. So, I’ve started the process of emailing myself some the better pictures as there’s no way I’d be able to create a photo book from the small screen of the phone.
Thanks again!!
Oh, and I’ve already ordered some prints from Shutterfly. It will be interesting to see how those compare to the walgreens ones.
Looks like with shutterfly, i can upload them all my pictures from the phone, access my account on my computer and view all the pictures there. So, no need to keep emailing them to myself. Thank goodness!! 😊
Carrie
If you use the Costco program, you download the pix to Costco to keep in an album stored there. You then chose to put specific pix in your photo book. I'm assuming Shutterfly is the same way. I can usually send about 30 pix at a time, so that takes awhile to send hundreds, but I do it while I'm watching a less than thrilling tv program.
Are you saying you don't have a home iPad or laptop from which to manage photos? That would be difficult to do from a phone.
Would love to see some of your pix. I have never figure how folks here post pix on the Forum.
Enjoy re-entry with all happy memories !
It's a real convenience to have Shutterfly mail the products to you and they were super fast. I really appreciated that during the past 3 years. I should mention that I created some large canvases using several significant portraits taken on our travels. They turned out even better than I could have imagined and made a great Christmas gift during our non-travel period. One wasn't stretched tightly enough for my taste and instead of having me return it they just created a new one and got it to me days before Christmas. That was the best effort I've ever seen for me as a customer. I was so encouraged that I created a large book using the negatives from our first travel together. The options were outstanding and the product amazing aside from a certain small loss of detail compared to the prints of those same files.
I have never figured out how folks here post pix on the Forum...
@Pat - There isn't any way to post pictures here on the forum (so if you've been trying to figure out how to do that, you can stop trying!).
But you can add a LINK in your post that points to a photo hosted somewhere else -- that's easy (though you need to have a "somewhere else" set up to host your photos -- lots of the big tech companies provide this service to host your photos, often with a limited amount of storage for free, hoping you'll want/need more and will pay them once your storage needs outstrip the free space they give you). Here's an example:
The software running the forum here was custom-built for RSE long ago, so lots of features that one sees on other popular forums are missing. The fact that it's custom built provides some benefits and limitations (it's probably less vulnerable to common hacks and attacks than other, more widely used software...it's a very small "target" compared to widely used forum software; although it was built in an era when attacks were less widespread, so it may or may not have greater security vulnerabilities -- I have no insight into that and it's probably best not to dwell on that; lots of limitations, most of all it's probably very challenging to maintain and update...like adding features). It is what it is, it works, and it probably doesn't cost them a lot to run. The forum is incredibly valuable in many ways to the company, so even though it doesn't directly produce any revenue, I'm sure they recognize its importance.
By the way, there are good reasons why any forum software would not allow images to be hosted -- primarily because it costs money (potentially a lot of money) to host photos. RSE is not a mega corporation with unlimited deep pockets, so it would be madness (and lead to ruin) if we could all upload our vacation photos here -- not gonna happen, ever. That said, it should probably be technically possible to do what many other forums do, and allow photos that are hosted elsewhere to be displayed here within a forum post (which is commonly done on many forums). This has been a longstanding feature request, I think. Probably a fairly low priority (just a guess), their primary business is travel, not running a feature-rich forum. Enjoy it for what it does provide.
This thread is very interesting, as it addresses things that hadn’t quite occurred to me. While a photo-printing robot couldn’t care less about turning the Matterhorn into a mesa, the aspect ratio of a smartphone (and an iPhone 8+ is sized differently from a 12 or a 13Pro) is quite different than that of an 8”x10” glossy print, or the smaller snapshots of yesteryear.
Similarly, at our main home, we’ve still got a pretty old Sylvania television set. It’s not a flat screen nor widescreen, and the cabinet sticks way out in back, to accommodate the picture tube, and extra wiring or other components. The screen is almost square - slightly wider than it is tall. It worked fine 10 years ago, but now, watching the news, or a Stanley Cup hockey game (Go Avs!), a lot gets cut off on the left and right edges. Local stations and networks are now transmitting images in a format designed for a much more “landscape,” and much less “portrait” viewing. Graphics displayed in the broadcast (weather temperatures and precipitation for tomorrow, bullet point details and statistics pertaining to a story, current score of the game , etc.) don’t appear at all, and we’d need a screen a foot wider to see what’s left off of our screen.
Frankly, we’re not going to be investing in a new T.V. at the moment, for many reasons. But it’s clearly like having photos printed- if you don’t keep up with new developments, you’ll get left far behind. If I wind up having any of the many photos living on my phone actually printed, I can expect to pop arts of each image cropped. And to think I carefully ensured that each image fit so well on the phone’s screen! It used to be that, if something appeared within the viewfinder of a film camera, that’s what you got on your negative, and that’s what would show up on your print.
Ah, the good ol’ days, when the Matterhorn had a summit that you could capture on a printed photograph!
we still have a pretty old Sylvania television set. It’s not a flat screen nor widescreen, and the cabinet sticks way out in back, to accommodate the picture tube
I wonder how many had to do a search for "Sylvania TV" and 'picture tube' vs those of us marveling you have a working tube TV?
Uh, TV changed quite a few years ago. Just saying. I had to buy a little adapter for my mother's TV because she didn't want to replace it.
I’m not sure whether I should be more embarrassed by the vintage of that one TV, or that I watch it in the first place! At least lots of the programming is PBS, where I first learned of Rick Steves.
And don’t get me started on the stereo …
I still have my old Canon AE1 SLR (film) camera, but it’s been gathering dust for many years. Composing pictures with a Smartphone is a different process now, based on OP Carrie’s experience!
Pat, i just have the one company provided laptop. I find it easier to just have one. I've started working on a photo book on shutterfly. If there's a way to provide a link so others can view it, i'll for sure do that.
I'm wondering now too, based on all the great info. here, if there's something i can do differently when i take the pictures. Maybe not have the top of the Matterhorn at the very top of the photo.
The bottom line is that Walgreens prints 4x6 photos -- a 2x3 proportion. Your phone takes pictures at a 3x4 proportion. The best workaround I have found is put some kind of 2x3 proportioned background behind my photos. I can do it easily in batch in Adobe Lightroom, but there are a number of iPhone apps that let you add a background. Superimpose is one app that comes to mind.
You can also crop your photos to a 2x3 format before you send them to Walgreens.
Personally, I prefer to make photo books with Blurb. However, my 86 year old mother often likes for me to send individual photos to her. I print the photos at her local Walgreen's, 250 miles from my house. I call her, and she goes to Walgreen's and picks up the photos. The nice thing about using Lightroom, is that I can add a caption in addition to the background, and my mom can see what the picture is about.
Photo quality aside and if you want to stick with a budget option, another poster mentioned that you can crop in the app or on the site with Walgreens and other budget photo printers, but you don't even have to crop per se. If you flip through the preview of the photos you are ordering, it will show how your photos will be cropped to the printable ratio. There is a "box" around the part that will be printed and you can slide it around to make sure the Uncle Tony's head isn't removed (You may have to give up his feet.). It will also help determine, ahead of time, if most of your photos will come out reasonably cropped or if there's no point.
Sleight, being unfamiliar with the printing process, I didn’t realize I needed to preview all the photos before ordering. Lesson learned!!
I have the Shutterfly app on my iPhone programmed to automatically upload all of the photos I take. I can then order prints from the app or use the Shutterfly website on my computer (it’s easier to crop/make photo books/etc., on a bigger screen, with a keyboard).
I didn't know Shutterfly had an app!
I put the photos I really like on our Nixplay so I can see them all the time. Very very few get printed. Some get made into photo books using Blurb.
