Review: Printiki Photo Printing Service

A long, long time ago in a land far, far, far away… okay so I’m exaggerating my hiatus a little. Let’s try that again: a while back… that’s better. A while back, a company called Printiki dropped me an email and asked if I’d like to try out their services and write up a review for you lovely readers. Anyone who ever visited me when I lived in my house in the country would know that I have a slight obsession with hanging cute retro looking photos (usually polaroid snaps) around my house, so suffice to say I was keen to try Printiki out.

I love the range of things you can do with prints. I often feel like our reliance on digital photography has meant that we just don’t remember to print photos out that often any more. I looked around my house a while back and realised that most of the photos I had up were from almost a decade ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for nostalgia, but it seemed to me that I should probably have a few photos up with the people I spend most of my time with these days, rather than someone I maybe haven’t even seen since 2004.

Printiki offered me the opportunity to order 30 of their 4×4 Square prints.* Read on to find out how it went and what I thought of the process, product and company!

What is it?

Printiki is a photo printing service. Their website says they offer prints, posters and photobooks, but I could only find the prints in the creator app so I suspect only the prints are available in Australia at this stage. The prints are offered in traditional prints with a small border, or retro prints which have a thicker bottom border to make them look more like old school polaroid photos.

How does it work?

From their site, you can browse the different products and check out the prices. When you’re ready, you click “Print my photos” in the top right of the menu which takes you to a creator. From there, you can select which type of print you want (normal or retro) and then what size. You then have the option to upload from your computer, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, One Drive or Google Photos. I did my uploading through Facebook, but I also tried it from my phone using the upload function and it worked fine too.

Print quality, shipping and other important info:

The prints shipped and arrived within the quoted time so no hassles there. They were packaged inside an envelope and arrived with no creasing or damage of any kind. Just the nice shiny prints you’d want and expect!

I ordered two different kinds of photos to really test out the printing quality of Printiki. I ordered one set of “happy snaps” just taken from my phone and one set of “photography”.

Photography Prints

The prints I ordered of my photography were all shots which had more intricate details and brighter colours. I was, however, still uploading them through Facebook and Instagram and other sites that used compression, so I was curious how Printiki would deal with the conversion and picture quality. As it turns out, totally fine! All the photos were crisp and clear in their colours and I was really happy with the result. The one exception to this was the photo in mostly red that you can see above on the left. This one seemed to wash out and go a bit brown rather than red. I’m fairly certain this is just because compression of jpeg files always seems to result in an odd cast on photos with so much red in them. It looked fine on Facebook and Instagram where I grabbed it from, but I suspect that the loss in quality between the two had more to do with the original image than Printiki’s uploader. Just something to keep in mind if you’re ordering something very red though – upload the higher quality photo from your computer directly, as there’s no guarantees it’ll hold up to lazy shortcuts like mine.

“Happy Snaps”

Happy snaps is where I felt Printiki really excelled. I loved being able to grab these so easily from my social media accounts and finally have a hard copy of pictures I’ve loved. I’ll actually definitely be making another order once I’ve moved house – I’d love to be able to have more recent photos from my phone scattered around the place. Again there were no issues with quality – everything was crisp and clear despite being from a wide range of sources with a wide range of quality. I wouldn’t guarantee how these would turn out for much larger prints, but for the small snapshots of casual fun times you want around the place, these 4×4 are perfect.

Framing

These snaps also look great framed, although if you do want to frame them I suggest you get the traditional prints rather than the retro. I got retro so you can see they look a little odd in their square frames. I think eventually I’ll just crop the bottom portion and put them against a coloured background to fill the empty space, but overall I still think they look fantastic. You can check out their Instagram for more ideas about how to display your pics!

Overall

Printiki was quick, easy and fun to use. Although my prints were kindly gifted from the company, I have no qualms whatsoever about making another of my own later. Twenty prints at $14, plus $4.95 shipping, works out cheaper than your standard polaroid film (for the minis you’re looking at minimum $1 per photo if you buy your film on ebay in bulk) which are smaller and, in my experience, also harder to frame. I’ll definitely be using Printiki again.