These days, Amazon will sell you almost anything, and photo prints are no exception. Though photo printing doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the retail behemoth, the options are well-rounded. The image quality of prints from Amazon Photos (formerly called Amazon Prints), however, trails that of most competitors we’ve tested. Though still not category-leading, the site’s interface has been streamlined since our last review, and if you’re a Prime member, you get free, fast delivery (but if not, delivery is expensive). Packaging has been improved since our last review, but in general, you’d do better to select one of our Editors’ Choice services instead, including Nations Photo Lab for the best overall, Snapfish for value, and CVS Photo for same-day local pickup.

How Much Does Amazon Photo Printing Cost?

As with most services, the prices for photo prints from Amazon have risen since our last review. Glossy or matte 4-by-6 (or 4-by-5.3) prints start at a still-reasonable 17 cents each (up from 15 cents in 2020). Prints at the 5-by-7-inch size cost just 69 cents each, and 8-by-10s cost $2.09 (up from $1.79).

The excellent Editors’ Choice-winning Snapfish undercuts Amazon at all three of these common print sizes, and Snapfish delivers the cheapest 4-by-6 prints at the pittance of 9 cents per print. Among the non-local-pickup options, Mpix has the highest-priced 4-by-6s, at 36 cents apiece. For the convenience of one-hour local pickup, you pay 39 cents per shot at CVS Photo and 37 cents at Walgreens.

Many people reading this will already have an Amazon account login, and that’s all you need to get started with printing photos using Amazon. As a refresher, you just need an email address—which the service will verify—and a password. You don’t need to enter payment or credit card info until you pull the purchase trigger.

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Amazon Photo Gifts and Cards

As you might expect from the all-encompassing seller of everything, Amazon goes beyond mere prints with a selection of photo printing projects, but it’s surprisingly limited compared with other services like Shutterfly and RitzPix. You can get the standard mugs, wall art, calendars, and photo books, along with a couple more-offbeat options like mouse pads and blankets. But the competitors offer more, including clothing, puzzles, pet bowls, and even shower curtains graced with your photos.

Amazon offers custom holiday cards emblazoned with your family photos, but the choices are far more limited than with competitors like Walmart Photo, as Amazon only offers flat 5-by-7 cards, priced at 99 cents each. Other providers offer folding cards, along with premium options like foil printing and linen cardstock. Walmart charges only 67 cents for 5-by-7 flat cards, and $1.28 for folding cards.

Uploading to Amazon Photos

In order to get prints from the online shopping giant, you must use its Amazon Photos service. Amazon Photos gives you 5GB free online storage, and a Prime subscription gets you unlimited photo storage and free shipping. You can only print JPG, HEIC, and PNG format image files. Some services, including Nations Photo Lab and Printique (formerly AdoramaPix), add more-detailed TIFF files as an option.

You cannot directly use your Facebook or Instagram photos with Amazon’s photo printing, though several services, including Printique and Snapfish, do allow this. But you can directly order prints from photos stored on Amazon Photos. If you’re a Prime member, it makes sense to take advantage of the unlimited online photo storage you get with your account to automatically back up all shots taken with your smartphone camera. Interestingly, uploading a 108-megapixel shot from a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra to the print service didn’t work, but the same shot that was already uploaded to my Amazon Photos account worked fine.

Amazon has cleaned up the confusion between its Prints and Photos options for buying printed photographs. The two different interfaces for ordering photo prints have thankfully been collapsed into one. The Amazon Prints branding has disappeared, and now everything is called Amazon Photos. That said, it’s not the most conveniently designed interface.

Once you select photos, you can change the number of prints you want, and the Review page shows you if and where any of your images will be cut off by the aspect ratio you chose. You don’t get any more choices until you click the Edit button. Amazon Photos marks a size in the options page as Best fit, which won’t crop your photos. Unlike other services that offer a convenient single page for adding sizes to all photos in order, Amazon can only do so one image at a time (see screenshot below), and the sizes aren’t all presented.

You can zoom an image to crop the print, but you can’t zoom out to add empty space for a photo that’s been cropped by the size you chose. What’s more, there are no image editing tools aside from a zoom crop. Several competitors include online tools for adjusting a photo’s lighting and color.

Shipping options are less speedy than you might expect for Amazon. The included Prime shipping option takes a full seven days. If you’re not a Prime member, you pay $9.99 for the same time window, with a slower $4 option available. For comparison, Nations Photo Lab’s lowest shipping price for our order was $3.95, and Printique’s is $6.95. Walmart charges $4 for seven-day delivery and $7.99 for four-day. RitzPix offers a very low-cost $2.99 ground shipping option, if you can wait the 10 to 12 business days.

If you need your pictures or holiday cards pronto, some photo printing services offer same-day pickup, though the prices go up for these options. Even though Amazon now has some physical store and locker locations, you can’t pick up your Amazon Photos orders at those locations the way you can when you print with CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart Photo.

Unlike some photo printing services, Amazon doesn’t offer any photo retouching, optimization, filters, or effects, as Mpix and Nations Photo Lab do. There are no wallet-size options. One option it does offer is Pearl Prints. According to the site, Pearl Prints have “a unique, high-gloss, reflective quality that’s almost iridescent, thanks to mica crystals embedded in the paper itself.”

When you choose a specialty product like aluminum or wood panel prints, you get a layout-design interface that lets you add multiple photos to the panel and arrange them to taste. You also get background texture choices, text overlays, and clip art options for holidays and special occasions. Other printed gift choices include ornaments, coffee mugs, blankets, and mouse pads.

Amazon Photos Mobile Apps

Amazon Photos, available as an Android app and iOS app, supports both online photo storage (including automatic photo uploading from your phone camera) and print ordering. The app has a Prints button at the top, from which you can not only order standard glossy and matte prints, but also decorative items such as the sort of canvas wall décor you might expect from CanvasPop, as well as prints on metal. You don’t get quite the selection of printing options you get on the desktop website, though. For example, cards, mugs and photo books don’t appear.

The app also offers album organization and private messenger-like group sharing. Using AI wizardry, it will find all the faces in your photo set and let you name them. It can also identify objects in photos, such as roads, hats, and cars, gathering all matching photos so you can see them at once.

The Results: Amazon Photos Quality and Delivery

Happily, our order arrived much faster than the estimated delivery dates on the checkout page. It took just three business days compared with the checkout page’s estimated two weeks.

For photo services, packaging counts, and Amazon Photos has improved in terms of delivery packaging materials. The service no longer uses flimsy soft envelopes (only Target did in my testing). It now uses a FedEx-style cardboard envelope, and another thick cardboard envelope inside that for larger prints. Printique and Mpix actually use hard cardboard boxes for maximum protection.

Print quality, though, is probably the most important factor in choosing a photo printing service. Amazon uses Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, which is quite good, but not as top-quality as the professional-level Kodak Endura paper used by Mpix and Nations Photo Lab. The last time I tested Amazon Photos printing, the color and sharpness in test prints were mostly good, but in the most recent test, they’re washed out, somewhat blurry, and the colors are a bit off. I suspect that Amazon has changed its supplier for photo printing. I scanned some examples with an HP PhotoSmart 4200 MFP for comparison with other services. Keep in mind that with the scanning, web server compression, and your monitor color rendering, it’s hard to show exactly how they look. So just take my word for it! (For a slightly larger view of the shots, you can right-click and choose Open Image in New Tab.)

In the cityscape shot above, you can see that the Amazon print has the least detail in the old building (the State Capitol in Albany, NY) of any of the competitors, and the color is washed out.

In the crop of a portrait print below, again you can see the lack of detail and sharpness compared with the other services’ prints. Like in the Walgreens print, the forehead is overly bright, but the latter still shows a lot more detail in the eyebrow, eye, and skin.

Not the Cheapest, Nor the Best

As with so many of the company’s other services, Amazon Photos delivers prints in acceptable packaging at a low price. The main drawback, and it’s an important one, is its subpar image quality. The ordering interface works, but it isn’t as full-featured and well-designed as that of Snapfish, our Editors’ Choice for affordable photo printing services. Our high-end Editors’ Choice winner is Nations Photo Lab, offering premium paper, top image results, and the sturdiest shipment packaging, while CVS Photo is your best bet for local-pickup and same-day prints.