Nations Photo Lab may not have Snapfish or Shutterfly’s name recognition when it comes to online photo printing services, but it certainly delivers the goods. Nations delivered the best quality prints among services we tested, and our test order arrived in excellent protective packaging. Though the company’s pricing is on the high side, it’s still quite reasonable when compared with other services that use high-end paper and processes. Nations is PCMag’s Editors’ Choice winner for high-end photo processing services, beating out the also-excellent Mpix and Printique.

How Much Do Nations Photo Lab Prints Cost?

Nations charges more for the standard 4-by-6 print than most of the competition at 32 cents each or 56 cents with color correction.  Occasional special discounts can put the price far below those figures, though. Nations recommends using its color correction unless you calibrate your monitor with specific ICC profiles.

The lowest-price photo printing service I tested, Snapfish, charges only 9 cents for 4-by-6 photos. Nations’ 5-by-7s cost a reasonable $1.25 ($1.69 with color correction) and the 8-by-10s are $2.49 ($3.25 with color correction).

Unlike many services, Nations hasn’t raised its prices in the last two years. Now Printique charges the same 32 cents per 4-by-6, and Mpix charges 36 cents. If you need same-day pickup from Walgreens Photos or CVS Photo, you’ll pay more, at 37 and 39, respectively. The best deals on 5-by-7s and 8-by-10s are from Walmart Photo, which charges 68 cents and $1.94. Amazon Photos isn’t far behind, charging 69 cents and $2.09 for 5-by-7s and 8-by-10s, respectively.

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Shipping via US Postal Service First Class with a 2-to-6-business day delivery window cost me just $4.95 for 21 4-by-6s, one 5-by-7s, and two 8-by-10s; other options include 4-10 days for $7.95; 3-7 days for $9.95, Expedited (2-4 days) for $14.95; and one-day Express for $34.95. If you visit Nations’ Maryland lab location, you can pick up your prints free of shipping charges.

What Cards and Gifts Does Nations Photo Lab Offer?

Nations produces more than just photo prints. You can order holiday cards, photo books, calendars, mugs, and home decor as well. Holiday cards start at $37.66 for a 25-pack, or $1.51 per card. That goes down to $1.37 per card with an order of three packs, to $1.27 for eight packs, and to $1.09 for 21 packs or more.

You can also get Christmas stockings and tree ornaments with photos printed on them. The most unusual photo gifts Nations offers are blankets, pillows, and dog tags. It’s a respectable selection, but it’s not quite as wide-ranging as Snapfish, which offers offbeat items like shower curtains and face masks with your photos on them.

Creating Orders With Nations Photo Lab

To start an order with Nations, you first choose a print size and surface type—Lustre, Glossy, or Metallic; the last option raised the per photo price to 62 cents. A linen texture option makes it 62 cents per shot, and color correction is 52 cents per. Don’t worry because you can change these options later.

Next you need to upload your pictures, after hitting the Customize Order button (which seems a little backwards, but  there it is). The service no longer lets you directly add photos from Facebook, Google Photos, Instagram, or other third-party cloud services, as Printique and Walmart Photo do, but it does support drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer or macOS Finder.

You can upload JPG, PNG, and TIFF files—more than most services, which usually limit you to JPG and maybe PNG. This TIFF support marks Nations as more professional, but uploading this format requires using Nations’ uploader utility, and they can’t have layers. Nations is one of the few services (along with Mpix, Printique, and Target Photo) that lets you upload a 108-megapixel shot from a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra—most of the budget services don’t.

Selecting multiple files to be uploaded at once works, but there’s a maximum number of 400 photos per upload. All photo files must reside in a Gallery, which could just be your automatically created top-level My Gallery.

On the ordering page, Nations makes it a little harder to select multiple prints for the same image. The other services usually show selection boxes for the standard size selections—4-by-6, 5-by-7, 8-by-10—in which you can enter the number of prints of an image at each size. With Nations, you must select the photos and then the size. After selecting them, you see a Review and Edit Crops window with all your selected images—which is good! You don’t want Aunt Debbie’s head half cut off.

The service offers no photo-editing or enhancing tools at all, such as those offered by Snapfish. Still, you’re probably better off editing images on your computer using an app like the free Windows Photos or the not-so-free Adobe Lightroom, which gives more options than online editing. There’s another issue with Nations’ cropping: You can’t uncrop. In other words, you can choose a subset of the image, but you can’t zoom out and make it smaller on the page. It’s particularly problematic when you have a square image that you want to print on rectangular paper with white borders. Another problem is that if you choose a border, such as white or black, Nations doesn’t show you a preview of it with your image.

Unlike during my last test of the service two years ago, Nations no longer offers a bunch of upsells, a welcome change that lets me get straight to checkout.

If you’re looking for a service with some online gallery-sharing capabilities, Nations is not for you. Amazon, Mpix, Snapfish, and Walgreens offer online sharing of your uploaded galleries, but if that’s a key functionality for you, you’re better off with a powerful online service, such as Flickr or SmugMug, which offer both public and private galleries.

Testing Nations Photo Lab

My Nations Photo Lab test order came back in double-layer cardboard shipping protection. Only Printique and Mpix provided equally sturdy packaging; Target Photo was the only vendor I tested that used thin paper envelopes. The order took three days from ordering to delivery—better than the estimated six days for my shipping option. The photos were perfectly flat and printed on genuine Kodak Endura photographic paper. The result was far more impressive than the curled, unbranded paper used by Walgreens and Snapfish’s loose 8-by-10 in its mailing envelope.

More important is the actual print image quality. In the cityscape below (the New York State Capitol Plaza in Albany, NY), Nations reveals more detail in the old building in the distance than most competitors, especially than its fellow high-end competition, Mpix and Printique. CVS, Snapfish, and Target are surprisingly sharp, too, but they don’t match Nations’ excellent color balance.

In the detail of a portrait shot below, the Nations print more closely matched the original than Mpix or Printique (the original was closer to the redder look in the Nations shot than to the warmer Mpix and Printique). It also offers more detail in the skin than the Printique shot.

The Highest-Quality Photo Printing

Nations Photo Lab costs more than big consumer-targeted services such as Shutterfly and Snapfish, but it delivers higher photographic quality in superior shipping packaging. That makes it our Editors’ Choice winner for high-end photo-printing services. Among low-cost options, our Editors’ Choice winner is Snapfish, and for one-hour local pickup, it’s CVS Photo.