Pretty pissed at Flickr (for a WHOLE lot of reasons I will not go into here) and their HP-enabled photo printing service Snapfish.
I ordered a poster-sized print of Paul Rifkin’s aerial shot of Cotuit Bay and the Kettleers playing at Lowell Park and got back a crap piece of work — colors off register (looked like it was whipped off on a crap ink jet printer) and most woefully, cropped with an axe losing the most interesting elements of the photo — the island at the top of the scene.
An utter waste of money. Serves me right for being lazy and not walking a local photoshop and getting it done right the first time. Avoid Snapfish.
update: Snapfish refunded me my cash via PayPal with no phone call required. Bravo to them for that.
For top quality consumer developing go to MPIX.com
They offer a great product at an affordable price.
try SmugMug — we use them to store our school’s photo archive so families can order prints. they give us a free account b/c we’re a nonprofit and are said to have been started for professional photogs who care about print quality. the best thing is they have real live humans who reply quickly to customer service emails.
http://bcdschool.smugmug.com (bet you can guess the password)
Picasa perhaps. Friends are on Smugmug. I have some professional issues with Flickr. Personal — great for the purposes of this blog and their video hosting is much better than YouTube. But Snapfish — more like Blowfish.
smugmug. My referral code: 7CaMtRAFzLDhE
also, whcc.com
and read this: http://blogs.smugmug.com/great-prints/
Before they closed up shop, RitzPics did poster size prints. I think you can still order through their website. I like to use the collage feature in Picasa desktop software to make, well, a collage. Printed a few out in 16×20 and framed up nicely.
But now RitzPics is all closed up, and I too am in search of good quality big prints.