How To Order Prints From Photos After Apple’s Print Service Is Gone

With Apple's Print service being retired after September 30, many people are wondering how to order prints, photo books, calendars and other products. Apple opened up Photos to allow third-party printing services last year. Already, several companies offer ordered prints and products directly from Photos. More will probably appear after first-party competition from Apple is gone.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: As of Mac OS version 10.13.6, that's the latest version of High Sierra, if you go into Photos, select some photos and then create a new project to print something, like get prints, or book, or calendar, or cards, you get this message. The message is warning you that the print projects from Apple are going away. The date of September 30th suggests that this is going to be gone from Mojave so you won't be able to print anymore after September 30th of this year. So what do you do if you still want prints or you want those cool projects.
Well, for awhile now Apple has allowed you to go and get third party extensions for Photos that allow you to print. This was a new feature awhile back and now we can see why. Because Apple planned to pullout of this market and they wanted to enable third parties to keep extending this. So let's take a look at what's available.
If we actually go and try to do this and say let's create some prints here there's an Open App Store button. The convenient thing about this is it takes you right to the section in the App Store that has products you can get that allow you to print directly from Photos or order prints online. So you can notice there's a small selection here but I predict it will be a much larger selection. One of the things keeping companies out of this market is that most people are just going to go to Apple for prints and books and calendars and things. But once that's gone people are going to have to go somewhere else. So there's going to be a much bigger market for these types of apps to thrive and I expect all the different services that offer prints online to also offer a photos extension.
So I've downloaded a bunch of different ones. Just kind of at random from what was here. You can see here open, open, open, and open. These four that I downloaded. The other ones I can get. For the most part they are free because you're basically buying prints from these companies. So they, of course, can offer the apps for free. 
Once you download these, go you hit Get and you hit Install, you don't actually use the app itself for this. Instead, when you create a new project here, you see these appear here at the bottom. So here are the four that I downloaded. If I wanted to go and use one, I'll just choose this first one here, it creates a new project and asks me permission to access my photos which is proper and then it shows me all these different things I can do with this particular service. 
Every service is going to be a little bit different. So FujiFilm Service right here I can order prints, I can do larger things like posters, I can do mugs, a bunch of different things. Cards. A whole bunch of things I can explore. If I just want to do prints I can click on prints here. I can select my type of print. I can see the prices are pretty comparably to what we've been used to. So we can do 4 X 6 prints. There are the photos I selected when I started. I can edit to crop them and things like that. I can click on the ones I want to order prints. You can see it adds it to the bag there. I can go and Continue to Cart. I can see there I can increase the quantity. I can checkout. It's going to ask me for payment information. I'm going to hit the Done button to Exit out of that. You can see the project remains there on the side.
We can ty another one of these. So we'll try this one here. A lot of them seem to have this interface where you can scroll through it. I can do phonebooks, I can do calendars, I can do cards. Let's try this one here. It has framed prints, gallery wraps, metal wood prints. So already we're seeing a lot more variety than you find right now in the Apple products. So that's good. Shutterfly, of course, is pretty well known online. But all they have here, so far, are books. 
I think we're going to see companies like that adding more potential products. A lot more companies entering the App Store with their products there so you can print directly from photos. I haven't tried any of these. I haven't tried ordering to see the quality so I'll be interested in hearing feedback if you use any of these services or tried some of the others. Over the next six months or so I think I'll probably do some orders with the various companies and I'll report what I have found in terms of quality.

Comments: 19 Responses to “How To Order Prints From Photos After Apple’s Print Service Is Gone”

Roger Rossman

6 years ago

So after Sept. 30, 2018, I will no longer be able to order personalized calendars from Apple?
Thanks. Roger

Gary Rosenzweig

Roger: That's right.

Christine MacDonald

Hi Gary

I have been using Freeprints for quite awhile and they brilliant, you only have to pay for the postage.

Art Koch

I am new to the Mac and have not ordered prints from Apple. What's the procedure?

Art: Well, no point trying it out now. You used to do it from within Photos, creating a new Project, a Print Project.

Marilyn

Great info Gary - what about printing a book from Apple's latest version of Pages - I saved it as an e-pub, but don't know how to print it.

Marilyn: Do you mean you want to send it out to a service to print? In that case, I would export as a PDF, not epub which is for ebook readers. Then search for a service online that will print and bind your PDF for you and send it.

Brian K. Clark

Thanks Roger, great info 👍

Thank you Gary!

Adam Snyder

Thanks for the info Gary. We do not use this service often, however we've been using Apple to print the next year's calendars for 6-7 years now. Giving those calendars as Christmas gifts. I suppose I will be learning who's the best on comparison to fill the gap afterwards. We look forward to seeing follow up from you.
Thanks

Felipe Ordóñez de Rivera

I have been using the iPhoto/Photos print service for more than 10 years to produce a Christmas card using one of the photos I have taken during the year. Yet another product Apple is abandoning … like Time Capsule … as the various MacBooks become increasingly user-unfriendly.

Judy Dee

I received a beautifully printed book from the Apple service some years back. I was so impressed with the quality. But it was expense and took a month to arrive so I never used it again. So I’m not surprised this is shutting down.
I look forward to hearing more about quality and turnaround times from new suppliers and whether it integrates fully with the Apple layout templates still.

merry winslow

is it possible to order reprints of books ordered in the past?

merry: If you haven't deleted them from your Photos app, then they should still be there under "Projects." Then you can create another order from that.

Thanks, Gary, But I lost that hard drive and all the backups . I
was wondering if apple could trace the order! Made the book several years ago.

merry: I'm pretty certain that Apple doesn't keep the data from print orders around after it has shipped. If they did, it would be for a very short time.

Dennis McBride

Did not know this. Their calendar was easiest to use. Who do you recommend. Thank you, really like your website.

Dennis: Don't have a recommendation for calendars yet as I haven't tried to order a non-Apple one yet.

Kathy Wilson

I have used Apple print service for my Christmas card photos for several years. I worked 1.5 hours this AM to make the system work and finally went to your site for help. Thank you for telling me Apple changed things. I used your info for the extension but Shutterfly is not listed so used MPiX. Awful program and double the price. Hope the pictures come back better than their system. Thanks for the help, good job

Comments Closed.

How To Order Prints From Photos After Apple’s Print Service Is Gone

Comments: 19 Responses to “How To Order Prints From Photos After Apple’s Print Service Is Gone”

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