Digital photos can be viewed in many ways on a computer screen on the digital camera built in screen and sometimes printer on regular traditional photo paper. Because printing involves tangible material and labor it is not free of charge.

If you need to print hundreds or more of digital photo prints chances are that you would not find an online digital photo printing service that would provide those for free. Digital photo printing is actually an expensive process. To achieve good quality prints the digital photo printer need to use expensive machines high quality photo paper high quality chemicals and ink and labor. And one the digital photo prints are ready they need to be shipped which involves extra cost depending on the weight of the completed digital printing order and the place to where they should be shipped.

Many only digital photo printing do offer however some free samples of their service. The idea is very simple. Those digital photo printing services would like users to try a few free prints in an assumption that once the users get used to using their photo printing service and once the user receives the printer samples in a timely manner and in high quality the user is likely to use that same photo printing service for his future digital photo printing jobs at the regular fee.

An additional assumption is that users are not likely to place an order for a free for a service that they are not familiar with thus providing free prints is almost a must for non brand names trying to get into the online photo printing market. Brand names can allow themselves to rely on their reputation and can assume users will use them even without free prints but reality is that because of the photo printing market being very competitive well known brands also provide free prints for users to sample their service.

Free digital prints are usually provided in a limited time on a per user basis. In other words you can only get up to a certain number of free prints and usually can only place one free printing order. Online photo printers identify a user usually based on the address to where the free prints are supposed to be shipped.

There are two main kinds of free prints offers on the market today. One is the real deal where the prints and the shipping are offered for free. The other one is a half way deal where the prints are offered for free while the user still has to pay a minimal fee for shipping only.

Free prints can and are used by many users to simply get free prints without any intention to ever order more prints at a fee in the future. Most online photo printing services offer anywhere between twenty to sixty free prints per user. If you do not print many photos and are in need for an amount in that range you can simply pick an online photo printing service you have not used in the past and get those prints for free. You can also combine a few different photo printing services order the maximum allowable free prints at each service. In this way you can combine a few printers and effectively get a total of hundreds of free prints. You should be careful though to check that the minimum shipping fees imposed by some photo printing service for those free prints do not add up to more than you would have paid if simply ordering the whole batch in one place.