- Membership is completely free and gets you 40 free prints
- Above average photo sharing and print ordering service
- Share photos directly with your friends and family
- Easy to use and cleanly laid out
- Many different ways to upload photos
- Create online photobooks to document your travels or birthday party
- Order clothes and bags with your photos printed directly onto them
- Share and sell your photobooks online
- Create online slideshows and let visitors order prints directly from it
- Easy drag and drop upload
- Sell your photos online with Pro Gallery
- Integrates with Google Picassa for easy uploads
- Unlimited storage for Pro Galleries
- Awarded 5 stars by the Sunday times
- Europe's leading online photo service
- Free 40 prints when you sign up
- Free membership
- Works on almost any device that can run a web browser
Photobox is, on the whole, a pretty good photo sharing and print ordering service. However, it seems to be in the process of doing some major changes which are introducing a few bugs and other nuisances. It's also not quite as glamorous as some of the sites we have looked at in this category, but don't let that put you off. We reckon once Photobox gets its few bugs ironed out we will be seeing it move up the top ten.
Uploading photos to Photobox is simple if you already use Google's Picassa software to organise your snaps on your desktop. The service integrates seamlessly and just lets you select which photos to upload before clicking one button to do it all for you. Mac users aren't left out either with equally seamless integration with iPhoto. Even if you don't use one of these popular applications for managing your photos you should still find it pretty easy to upload photos to your account. The web uploader tool is a bit clunky for uploading lots of photos at once, and we have seen better on other sites, but for just a few photos at a time it works fine. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to upload directly from your mobile phone - although it should be possible to browse the site from a mobile device.
The sharing options on offer from Photobox aren't quite as fully featured as some other sites we have looked at, but they still do the job. The main things you will probably want to do are create slideshows and photo-books, and this is handled easily. The slideshows aren't as glitzy as some others we have seen, but do have the handy option of allowing anyone watching it to order prints of any of the photos they see. This leads us on to one of the more useful features of Photobox if you are a photographer looking to get your work noticed. The site allows you to sell your photos simply by adding them to a Pro Gallery. You then set prices for the sizes of prints you want to make available and Photobox handles all the rest. Of course they do take a 10% cut of any transaction, but that's quite reasonable compared to some other sites.
Like many photo sharing sites, Photobox doesn't let you forget for long that there are plenty of different photo-based gifts and prints on offer. There is nothing very unique on offer here, just the usual assortment of mugs, t-shirts, posters etc, but there are some good options for the kids, such as personalized Pirates of the Caribbean merchandise. Prints are good quality and reasonably priced and there is a handy guide to making sure you get the best quality print possible from your original photo.
Photobox is one of the better photo sharing/print ordering sites around, but still has a few wrinkles to iron out before it's going to be moving up our top ten. It could also do with focusing slightly more on photo sharing instead of pushing sales so much. However it is a good forum for selling your photos if you think you have something that people will want to buy. Membership is free and you get 40 free prints when you sign up so you've nothing to lose by trying!
Click the button below to check out Photobox.co.uk for yourself...
