As digital cameras continue to spread like wildfire - fueled by falling prices and ever-increasing picture resolution - point-and-shooters are forced to deal with several unforeseen consequences:

• what to do when your computer’s harddrive collapses under the weight of gigabytes worth of pictures…
• how to store your images when traveling for extended periods of time without access to the internet…
• where to turn your digital images into prints?

The authoritative answer to the last question was provided in the August 2005 issue of Macworld. Contributor Ben Long discussed How to choose the best online photo service for your prints and provides a nice chart that compares pricing and features of select services:

One of the great things about digital photography is that you can choose to print only the photos you truly love—and then leave the other 20 shots of your cat perched precariously on the windowsill stored safely away for posterity. Far too often, though, even our best pictures never leave the confines of our computers. But if you have an Internet connection and a few minutes, you can turn your great shots into finished prints - without a photo printer, and without even leaving the house. Just upload them to an online photo-printing service and place your order.

There are a lot of online photo services out there, but there can be a huge difference in results from one online photo finisher to the next. To find the best option, I took a look at nine online photo services: Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Mpix, PhotoCheap, PhotoWorks, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Wal-Mart, Webshots, and the Order Prints option built into Apple’s iPhoto 5. I sent five different images to all of the services and then asked a jury of Macworld editors to evaluate the prints’ image quality. I incorporated their opinions into my overall evaluation of the services.

While I was hoping to find a clear winner that always produced superior prints, the frustrating truth is that most services produced good prints at some times and bad prints at other times. However, once you weigh price, speed, ease-of-uploading, and a few other considerations, some services stood out from the pack—in particular, Snapfish.

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