There are many ways to print digital photos. You can buy a simple inkjet printer and print low quality photo prints at home. Or you can buy a digital photo printer like the Canon Pixma which uses special photo paper and print high end quality photo prints at home. Home photo printing has advanced a lot in the latest years and currently relatively low cost home printers using special photo paper can yield high end photo prints that look like professional digital photo prints.



The problem with home photos is that it does cost money to print them. The expenses do not end with buying the printer. Good quality photo paper is expensive and also the ink used by the printer. In fact many digital photo printers are pretty cheap to buy. The real cost is buying expensive ink cartridges and expensive paper on a regular basis.

So if you do not want to go into the expense and trouble of getting home digital photo printing equipment the other alternative is to use one of the many brick and mortar or online photo printing services. Most services provide a wide range of products from printing standard size 4 by 6 inches photo prints to special printing jobs such as printing your digital photos on coffee mugs as gifts or memorabilia. Many photo printing services are also relatively cheap to use and for sure affordable.

To use an online photo printing service you would normally upload your digital photo files to the service servers. After upload the digital photo files you can usually apply some image processing such as rotating images cropping images removing red eye from images and more. You would then choose the photos that you would like to print and the photo prints size and other characteristics and submit the order. When the prints are ready they are mailed to you through one of many delivery services from rush overnight to standard and slow regular mail. The cost of shipping can be significant though when printing large quantities shipping becomes more and more negligible.

There is however a way to get your prints completely free. Many digital photo printing services offer trial prints some as low as 10 prints but a few other services as high as 50 or 100 photo prints. Some services would also provide free shipping although it is more common to be charged some minimal fee for the shipping cost only. Snapfish for example provides such a service letting new users try the service for free printing up to 50 digital prints. If you are not printing frequently you can take advantage of these free offers. You can get hundreds of free photo prints if you apply for free trials with many services taking advantage of the maximum free prints each one provides.