Walmart is known for offering products at lower prices than you can find elsewhere, and the chain’s photo printing service is no exception. It has the cheapest rates of any in-store printing service we’ve tested, and it’s among the least expensive options for mailed photos. But our test prints from Walmart weren’t as sharp as those from CVS Photo, our Editors’ Choice winner for local pickup, or from Snapfish, our Editors’ Choice for budget-friendly services. For the best prints among all services we tested, meanwhile, Nations Photo Labs comes out on top.

How Much Do Walmart Photo Prints Cost?

A 4-by-6-inch photo from Walmart costs just 12 cents, and you have three delivery options: one-hour store pickup, home delivery, and site-to-store. (That last option is for orders processed at a central facility and mailed to the store.) For comparison, CVS Photo and Walgreens Photo(Opens in a new window) charge 39 and 37 cents for one-hour photos that you pick up at their stores, respectively. For mail orders, there’s only one company that charges less than Walmart Photo for 4-by-6 prints (12 cents at Walmart), and that’s Snapfish, which charges only 9 cents per print. Amazon Photos is close at 17 cents and Shutterfly at 18 cents. Larger prints are also a bargain: 5-by-7s cost just 68 cents (beating Amazon and Snapfish by one penny), and 8-by-10s cost just $1.94 each—that’s from 12 cents to over a dollar cheaper than any competitor.

What Gifts and Cards Does Walmart Photo Offer?

Like Shutterfly, Walmart Photo lets you order many different types of objects on which you can print your favorite photographs. In addition to calendars, mugs, and photo books, you can choose blankets, phone cases, puzzles, jewelry, canvas bags, and clothing. It’s a large and growing selection that now matches Shutterfly in letting you adorn shower curtains and neckties with your pictures.

For photo-embellished greeting cards, Walmart has lower pricing than any of its competitors. Single-sided 5-by-7-inch postcard-style cards start at just 48 cents apiece, and you can get folding 5-by-7-inch cards for $1.42 even for a quantity of one—most services require higher volumes to get lower prices. Walmart also offers premium options like foil-printing and linen stock. You can get same-day local pickup service on some holiday cards.

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Uploading in Walmart Photos

Walmart Photo offers more ways to add your photos to your print set than any other service I’ve tested. You can add them from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Dropbox, or Google Photos. You can also drag and drop from a folder on your desktop or use a file picker to add them. The service only accepts JPG and PNG files, though—no GIF, HEIC, or TIFF files. The lack of HEIC support is troublesome, since most smartphones can now take advantage of that space-saving format.

After you upload your photos, the site creates a gallery based on the date. It’s better than the way CVS Photo and RitzPix operate because you have to first create a gallery with them.

Choosing and Configuring Photos for Printing in Walmart Photo

The Walmart Photo site is clear and well designed. When choosing print options, you can select multiple prints and print sizes for each image in one step, and the individual and tally price is always displayed, which I like. You don’t have to go back through the process multiple times for each print size, as you do with Nations Photo Lab. Snapfish works much like Walmart does in this regard. Walmart’s mobile shopping app now offers easy photo uploading or ordering features from your smartphone, which closely mimics the process on the website. The app even offers rotation, brightness, and black-and-white options.

You get a choice of matte or glossy prints with Walmart, and that’s about it—no borders or mountings. For one-hour pickup, matte is the only choice. During print-size selection, you see an Edit link for each image. This opens a simple editor with cropping, brightness, and tilt options. Here, you can also choose black-and-white or sepia treatments as well as full color. It’s not quite the repertoire of photo editing tools offered by some other services, such as Snapfish, but if you really want to get fancy, you’ll use your own installed software like Lightroom or even the preinstalled image editing apps on macOS or Windows, which are surprisingly powerful.

For my order of 23 prints, shipping cost $4 for seven-day service plus another $4 for the 8-by-10s, making it more expensive than several competitors. Snapfish charged $4.98 for everything. You can pay with credit card, PayPal, or Visa Checkout to ease the checkout process, and you can easily switch an order among the three different delivery methods.

Walmart Photo Shipment Packaging

My test photo prints arrived just six days after I placed the order online, even though I chose seven-day shipping. That’s quite good, especially compared with RitzPix’s 10 days. My pictures were packaged in a standard overnight light cardboard envelope, with the 8-by-10s in yet another cardboard envelope inside for added protection.

Though Walmart’s packaging isn’t as protective as Mpix, Nations Photo Lab, or Printique’s sturdy cardboard boxes for the same order, it’s perfectly acceptable. Walmart’s shipping package is equivalent to what Shutterfly and Snapfish offer, and better than the thin paper envelope Target Photos uses. This time around, the Walmart Photos packaging improved over my last test in 2020, when the 8-by-10s were loose in the main envelope.

How Good Are Walmart Photo’s Prints?

Like many online photo printing services, Walmart uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which delivers good image quality. However, I prefer Kodak’s thicker, sturdier Endura paper—which Nations Photo Lab and Printique use—because it often produces better image quality and is rated to last 100 years (200 years in dark storage). On the back of each photo, Walmart prints an inscrutable number code with the date, along with “Printed by Walmart.com.” I prefer services that print the filename or a title on the back, as Printique and Shutterfly do.

What about the most important thing, the quality and accuracy of the printed images? This time around, our Walmart test pictures were mediocre, matching competitors in neither sharpness nor color accuracy. They were, however, markedly superior to photo prints from Walmart’s archrival Amazon, which weren’t sharp and didn’t have good color reproduction.

In the landscape shot below, the Walmart Photo print is not as sharp as the CVS Photo, Snapfish, or Target Photo prints, though it’s clearly much better than the Amazon print.

In the portrait crop below, you can see again that Walmart Photo produced better image quality than Amazon Photo’s washed-out appearance. One-hour-photo competitor CVS Photo produced far sharper pictures than Walmart Photo, though CVS Photo’s color was oversaturated. In the print from Walmart’s same-day competitor Walgreens Photo, the forehead in the test photo was completely over-brightened, losing all detail, but the eye is still sharper than the Walmart Photo print.

Online Sharing With Walmart Photo

Photo albums are automatically shareable via an icon on the album page. You can share via Facebook or email. Your recipients get a full-browser-window slideshow and the ability to download the pictures. It’s not quite as robust as Shutterfly’s customizable mini-websites, and a disclaimer states that it’s not intended to be used as permanent photo storage, but it gets the job done for quick sharing. I do wish it would let me share a single image or selected photos rather than a full album, however.

Fast Photos for Less Money

Walmart Photo provides a clear, capable web interface, prices on the low end of the spectrum, and fast shipping or even local store pickup. The photo printing service delivers mediocre image accuracy, however, and its packaging is less protective than more expensive services like Mpix, Nations Photo Lab, and Printique. Ultimately, our Editors’ Choice award for affordable printing services goes to Snapfish. For high-quality photo finishing with more-protective packaging but higher pricing, look to our high-end Editors’ Choice winner, Nations Photo Lab, and for same-day local pickup our top choice is CVS Photo.