Did you get some great family photos over the holidays? There sure were plenty of flashes going off at my various family gatherings. I also heard a few folks mention that they had hardly memory left on their cameras.

Like many people, they&39;re storing their prized photos on their cameras – while other people are downloading them to their hard drives. In either case, it means that there are lots of grandpas and grandmas (like me) who are not getting prints the way they used to, back before digitals were so popular. And of course, many hard drive crashes have meant that more than a few families have lost some priceless shots.

Just in Time
I caught a very timely segment on our local NBC station last night that will hopefully make it easy for you to get some of your great shots printed. Kristen Dahlgren reported that there&39;s a price war going on between online photo printing firms, so prints are going for pennies a piece. To see who does the best job, Kristen picked a dozen of her favorite photos, and sent them off to:

    1.  http://www.kodakgallery.com
    2.  http://www.shutterfly.com
    3.  http://www.photocheap.biz
    4.  http://www.winkflash.com

While the prints themselves ranged in price from $ .08  to $ .19 each, there were various charges for shipping and handling, so Kristen&39;s total cost ran from a low of $2.43 at WinkFlash to a high of $4.27 at Shutterfly. Three out of the four batches of photos arrived within a week, with the ones from PhotoCheap taking two weeks to get there.

The Best Part
All the prints looked pretty good to Kristen, although she did see problems with photo cropping and color on some of the copies. Bob Colmer, a professional photographer she consulted, thought about 80% of them were perfectly fine for family photos, with Shutterfly getting his highest grade. Bob and Kristen both felt that all four sites were easy to use.

I visited the sites this morning, and found offers for free prints at three out of the four them, so it surely won&39;t cost you very much to get a whole pile of prints made. And just think … you&39;ll have a terrific present to send Grandma for Valentine&39;s Day.