Like Walgreens, CVS drugstores are ubiquitous, making them ideal pickup locations for photo prints you upload to the store’s website. Another similarity is that both charge higher per-print prices than most mail-away services. In fact, CVS Photo’s prices are the highest we’ve seen for the photo printing services we tested this year. But among the local one-hour pickup options we reviewed (the others being Walgreens Photos and Walmart Photos), CVS produced the sharpest photo prints. So the slightly higher price is worth it if you need prints fast, earning CVS Photo our Editors’ Choice award.

How Much Do Photos Cost at CVS?

As mentioned, prints from CVS Photo cost more than prints from its competitors, at 39 cents per 4-by-6-inch photo. That compares with just 9 cents at Snapfish. Other in-store pickup options also cost a bit less. Walgreens Photo charges 37 cents and Walmart Photo charges only 12 cents per 4-by-6 whether you have it mailed or pick it up in the store in an hour. As with most of these services, prices are frequently discounted and you can often get online coupon discounts.

Larger sizes are also quite a bit pricier than competitors, with CVS 5-by-7s ringing up at $2.99 each. That compares with the top-flight Nations Photo Lab’s 5-by-7 price of $1.44 and Shutterfly’s 99 cents. At the 8-by-10 size, even the pro photo finisher Printique charges less at $2.65, compared with CVS’s $3.99. That’s quite a premium to pay for local pickup. CVS Photo can make prints up to 24 by 36 inches in size.

As is the case with most online photo printing services, you can order more than just paper prints at CVS Photo. It offers standard options such as greeting cards, calendars, photo books, mugs, T-shirts, and wall canvases, and you can get images printed on blankets, potholders, mouse pads, and other items. For $30, you can get a necktie festooned with multiple copies of your photo. CVS doesn’t offer quite as massive a selection as Shutterfly does (personalized flowerpots or aprons, anyone?), but there’s probably more than most people will ever need and a lot more than Printique offers.

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It’s easy to get started with a photo printing order on CVS’s website, as the service only requires a name, email address, and password. The password requirements are stringent, with special characters required.

CVS Photo’s Print-Ordering Interface

CVS’s photo-ordering site sports a modern, clear interface that bears a strong resemblance to those of RitzPix and Walgreens Photo. In addition to letting you upload image files from your computer, the service doesn’t let you import photos from Facebook and Instagram, though you can upload Facebook photos when you use the CVS Photo mobile app, discussed more in a bit. It does, however, let you connect your Google account to transfer photos from Google Photos.

Before you upload photos, you must create an album to upload them to. When uploading from your computer, you can select multiple files at once, but the site doesn’t support drag and drop. You can upload JPGs and PNG files, but not TIFF or GIF files. It rejected a 108-megapixel shot from my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, as did several other services, though Target Photo accepted it.

What can you do once you’ve uploaded photos? CVS Photo offers basic editing options that are identical to what you get in Walgreens Photo. You can turn on auto color correction, contrast, and fill flash, and use sliders to adjust brightness and contrast. You can also apply a limited number of effect filters, including black and white, sepia, and color tints. Finally, you can crop and rotate the images.

You can share the albums you create via Facebook, by email, or with a web link, and the resulting presentation is reasonably attractive. If you share via email, the recipients have to have CVS online accounts, but sharing via a link doesn’t come with that requirement.

I approve of CVS Photo’s ordering page, which lets you enter a quantity for each size print you want all at once. Some services make you choose the prints and then choose the size for each separately. You can choose a matte finish, but not for in-store pickup, which is restricted to glossies.

As soon as I placed my test order, CVS’s estimated ready-for-pickup time shown was identical to the time I placed the order, which doesn’t make much sense. The company should at least build in a 15-minute delay or something more realistic. To let me know of the actual availability of the prints (as opposed to the estimated), for my 4:52 p.m. order, I received an email the next morning at 8:35 a.m. saying the photos were ready, even though the site said the photo department is open until 11:59 p.m, so I should have been able to pick them up the previous evening.

If you’re not picking up the photos, delivery options are very reasonable: My order of 19 4-by-6s and two 8-by-10s would have cost only $1.97 for 10-day delivery and $16.97 for Next Day. Picking it up yourself is free, though. You pay for the order at the store, so it costs you nothing until you pick up the pictures, unlike Walgreens which has you pay ahead.

Using the CVS Pharmacy Mobile App

The CVS Pharmacy mobile app (Android and iOS) lets you order prints from photos stored on your smartphone, from your Facebook photos, or from images you’ve already uploaded to your CVS account. However it only offers the high-priced same-day pickup option. You don’t get any cropping, editing, or special options with the mobile apps, nor can you order printed gift objects like mugs. That said, the app has a simple interface that makes it easy to get prints quickly in various sizes.

Testing CVS Photo’s Print Quality

When I picked up my photos, the prints were presented to me loose in a manila envelope. That’s very different from the thick cardboard box and other packaging provided by higher-end photo processors. Then again, since my CVS photos were not being shipped, packaging wasn’t as much of a consideration.

Price and packaging aside, CVS produces impressive prints on Kodak Moments paper, which is optimized for the printer used. I found the results very sharp and pleasing in general, if a tad oversaturated. In fact, they were among the sharpest test prints of any service I tested, even the higher-end ones like Mpix. Walgreens Photo, the only same-day competitor, yields less-saturated colors, though its prints are not as sharp as CVS’s.

In the portrait detail above, you can see part of the forehead is overly bright so as to lose detail in the Walgreens print, same with the Amazon and Walmart Photo prints, both of which aren’t as sharp as CVS’s either. The coloring of the original image I submitted looks more like the CVS and Nations prints, and less like what I got from Mpix and Target, even though those have a pleasing look.

There was no text on the back of my test photos to indicate the filename or a title, as many other services add. That’s not a key feature, but it is an organization helper that I missed when it wasn’t there.

You can see CVS’s greater detail in the cityscape above. True, the CVS print is more saturated than the prints from other services, but we’re putting more weight into sharpness for these reviews. If you don’t need a one-hour turnaround, you can get just as much sharpness from Snapfish or Target with less saturation.

The Best Option for One-Hour Local Pickup

Our test order at CVS cost more than competing photo printing services, even slightly more than the other big chain drugstore, Walgreens. Despite those higher prices, the final results from CVS are impressive, particularly in sharpness, compared with the one-hour competition from Walgreens and Walmart; in our portrait test, CVS was the only service that didn’t blow out skin highlights. That makes CVS Photo our Editors’ Choice winner for photo printing services offering one-hour local pickup, alongside Nations Photo Lab as our high-end choice and Snapfish as our budget pick.