People who know me know that I am an avid scrapbooker. Several years ago, my husband got me an Epson Picturemate so I could print photos at home. I had surfed until I found a bargain online on ink and paper that enabled me to print photos for 19 cents a print.

I liked the convenience of printing photos at home, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I could get photos printed for less money. A lot of my friends had been raving about Snapfish. So after doing some research, I learned that they only charge 9 cents a print (which works out to about 12 cents a print with shipping). I signed up, got 50 free prints, and was impressed with the quality and speed of the service. I will still use my photo printer sometimes, but when I am printing 200+ photos at a time, I think Snapfish will save me time and money.

Where we really saved money was on printing professional photos. We recently splurged and had a professional photographer take some photos of us. In the hour session we had with the photographer, she took nearly 300 photos of the kids, the family, and my husband (he needed a mugshot for work). The photographer did such a good job, and it was hard to select photos.

Because we have a large family we wanted to share photos with, it was going to cost us a lot of money for prints. We finally decided to purchase the rights to the digital photos. The photographer gave us a CD-ROM with ALL of the photos on it. We have the right to print/use the photos as we wish.

I then uploaded the photos we wanted to Snapfish and saved a lot of money on printing. For example, we saved $12 on each 8×10, $7 on 5×7 prints, and $5 on each sheet of wallets.

I’m also excited because I can use the photos to make gifts, to digital scrapbook, decorate my desktop, etc.

The professional photographer was expensive, but in the end it was a great VALUE for us.