Ease of Use - Ordering Process:  

The PhotoWorks site is well-organized, clean and easy to navigate. This service makes the process of uploading your digital images and placing your order a real snap. While ordering, you can select either glossy or matte finish, borders or borderless prints, which size you want and how many you need.

Quality of Prints:  

To test for quality, we sent the same digital photos to all of the online photo developers we reviewed. Photoworks’ prints were nice, but there was something about all of them that was indistinct, they just didn’t seem as crisp as some of the other prints.

However, unlike some other services PhotoWorks doesn’t have a 4 x 5.3 print size. If you are looking to preserve the aspect ratio of your digital originals you would need to downsize to a 3.5 x 5 print. Although our photos came out with minimal cropping the pictures themselves seemed quite small.

• Sunset: The color was nice and well balanced. Our models didn’t seem dark or washed out. Click here to see a comparison.

• Black and White: Photowork’s black and white image was a little dark and compared to some of the other prints it seemed to have a little too much blue in the exposure. Click here to see a comparison.

• Aerial: Photoworks cleaned up our aerial shot a little, but it was still very obvious that the photo was taken on a cloudy or foggy day. Click here to see a comparison.

Note: To check quality, we took each set of prints received from the online photo developer and laid them down side-by-side for comparison.

Pricing:  

PhotoWorks.com is probably one of the more expensive services we reviewed. Although  $.19 per print isn’t extraordinarily outrageous, we found that there are many other services, with better name recognition and brandings selling prints for much less.This was the only service we reviewed that accepted PayPal.

Service and Site Features:  

PhotoWorks includes many of the basic features you’d expect to see from an online photo printing service including album sharing, online storage and editing tools. We found that although PhotoWorks has one of the most aesthetically pleasing online editing tools we used, it took a long time to load and the effects weren’t particularly worth the wait.

We really enjoyed that PhotoWorks allowed you to import pictures from Flickr, a very popular photo sharing website. And they evaluated, on a scale, how good your photographs were for printing.

PhotoWorks.com digital photo developing offers a great selection of photo-based gifts including puzzles, tote bags, porcelain Christmas ornaments, magnets, mosaic tile murals and more. This service will even put your digital photo onto a canvas.

Shipping Costs/ Turnaround Time:  

PhotoWorks.com charged $1.95 to ship us four 4 x 6 inch prints, when the actual postage for USPS First class mail was $1.14. This means $.81 went toward their handling and packaging costs. This amount for shipping is kind of expensive amongst most online photo developers; however, unlike most of the services we reviewed, your shipping cost will go up after 20 prints, not 10. 

Our photographs were sent in a standard cardboard photo folder and packaged in a light-weight cardboard packing envelope.

We gave each service we reviewed 1 to 6 business days to ship us our finished prints in order to receive a high score in this category.  PhotoWorks had our photos delivered in 4 days.

PhotoWorks.com also ships all over the world.

PhotoWorks.com is an organized and easy to navigate site with a wide variety of special gifts. And since they also ship all over the world, you can take advantage of their services, no matter where you live. But their higher shipping prices and smaller print sizes were a bit of a turnoff. Please see our top 3 products: Snapfish, York Photo and Clark Color.