Sooner or later, we all want prints. We want to know that we’ve got copies somewhere for the day that the world runs out of power or we can’t read our CDs or whatever – it’s just nice to have printed copies.
We observe that behavior in our customers. People pile up digital images and then, every few months, print a bunch of photos. Here are two secrets for printing at the lowest possible price.
“Bulk” Printing
Years ago, dotPhoto invented “bulk” printing, which is now sometimes called “prepaid”. You buy the rights to print a number of prints – usually 4x6s. Many people ask whether the prints must be the same image: no, you can print 500 different images or 250 doubles or whatever you want. You can use some bulk credits now and some later; you’ve got a year to use them up.
As I write this, 500 bulk prints are selling for just $49.95 or about 10 cents each, but there are also packages and smaller monthly print plans that are real deals. To check out current bulk prices, click here.
The Secret Best Print Deal: lower cost than loose prints!
The very least expensive way to print photos – and far and away the best – is in a photo book. At today’s sale price, book prints work out to just 8.83 cents per image and include the book with stitched binding. Even when the books are not on sale, the price per image is just 11.77 cents each – it’s like getting the best deal on prints plus a free photo album plus having someone put the prints in the album for you!
Here’s how this works. In a cloth book, choose the 12-photo-per-page layout. You also get one larger photo on the title page for a total of 229 photos.
Incremental pages are even less: at 99 cents per page with 12 images, the next image is only 8.25 cents.
For current photo book information and pricing, click here.
The easiest way to produce a book is to start a new album and copy the photos and albums that you want to print into it. It’s easy to put together the 229 images you want, order them by capture date and print a book.
For information on how to print ANYTHING in a dotPhoto book, click here.
Getting more out of dotPhoto 