3 Out of 5
dotPhoto is the winner of the 2007 TopTenReviews Gold Award for photo sharing services. With dotPhoto you can share, print, and sell your photos, and they offer a website for hosting your pictures, allowing you to share them with friends and family. They also let you upload videos to the site, and they have a Show Builder, which lets you build custom slide shows.Using the Site
Opening an account with dotPhoto is free, and comes with 50 free prints. That’s a pretty impressive introductory offer, however, we did have some issues with it. After signing up, we did not receive the free prints. We contacted the company and, after a couple of days, the credit was added to our account. To check to see if your credits have been added to your account, click “My Account” on the top of the page and look on the right side. Once your free prints have been used up, the price is only 12¢ per 4×6 print.
Like many other photo printing services, dotPhoto includes some free editing tools, like red-eye removal, cropping, and effects. It also has a shop where you can buy gifts printed with your photos, like mouse pads, puzzles, and coffee mugs.
dotPhoto has a “free unlimited” storage policy. This means that you can store as many photos on their site as you want. However, the site did not state under which conditions, or whether after a certain period of time, the photos would be deleted or resized.
Ordering Prints
Ordering prints from dotPhoto is easy, just add selections to your cart and you’re on your way. You can choose what size you want each photo to be, and whether you want glossy or matte prints. We ordered 50 prints from the site and paid $3.85 for shipping. We placed our order on a Thursday, using standard shipping (3-5 business days), and our prints arrived on the next Tuesday. Our order was filled correctly and arrived in a sturdy cardboard package with an inner paper envelope.
Print Quality
The prints we received from dotPhoto were good quality, printed on thick Kodak Royal Digital paper. After comparing our prints with those ordered from other sites, however, we noticed that the prints from dotPhoto had slightly less clarity and color. The cropping was also a little less accurate than that of other services.
Conclusion
Online Service & Sharing: 3 out of 5
Print Quality: 3 out of 5
Overall: 3 out of 5
dotPhoto is a popular online photo printing service, and they deliver good prints at very low prices. However, in our experience, we did have to make a request for the free prints we were offered, and we have seen better quality prints from other services (though usually for slightly higher prices). If you’d like to check out dotPhoto, sign up now and get 50 free prints!
