The instant gratification of digital photos cannot be overstated. You take a picture and boom, you can see it! You can tell right away if the lighting was horrible or the person had his eyes closed, and retake until it's perfect. It's so much better than the old way of shooting 24 frames of film and not knowing what you had until you got those expensive prints back from the lab.
But don't you also miss the thrill of getting back a thick envelope of prints? Cracking open the seal, pulling out that stack of glossy paper, and reliving those long-ago moments as you thumb through each image—those were all good things too.
Nowadays, you can have your cake and eat it too. (After you take a picture of it, of course.) You know you can use your smartphone to shoot, edit, and share images online. Plus with one of these handy apps, you can still send away for lab-quality prints, without having to get your computer involved. These seven apps tap into your phone's photo library to let you order prints and other photo products, either to arrive in the mail, or to be picked up at a local store.
Free Prints builds the price of the prints into the shipping, but it's still a good deal.
Free Prints' big draw is right in the name—the app offers you 85 free prints per month, but only one print per photo. (Any additional prints of a single photo are 9 cents each.) Standard shipping is $2.99, to arrive in 5 to 13 days, or for another dollar they'll get it to you in 4 to 6 days. My order of 18 regular 4-by-6-inch prints and one 5-by-5-inch print (of a square photo I took with Instagram) came to $4.48 once I chose the shipping upgrade.
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