Walmart is known for offering products at lower prices than you can find elsewhere, and the chain's photo printing service is no exception. It has the cheapest rates of any in-store printing service we've tested and is among the least expensive options for mailed photos, with only Snapfish charging less. For those reasons, as well as good print quality in our test photographs, Walmart is our Editors’ Choice winner for budget-friendly services that deliver photo prints by mail. For the best quality prints among all the services we tested, Nations Photo Labs comes out on top, and for local pickup, we recommend Walgreens Photo.

How Much Do Walmart Photo Prints Cost?

A 4-by-6-inch photo from Walmart costs just 14 cents, and you have three delivery options: one-hour store pickup, home delivery, and site-to-store. (That last option is for orders processed at a central facility and mailed to a local Walmart that you choose.) For comparison, CVS Photo and Walgreens Photo charge 39 and 37 cents, respectively, for one-hour photos that you pick up at their stores.

For mail orders, there's only one company that charges less than Walmart Photo for 4-by-6 prints, and that's Snapfish, which charges only 9 cents per print, though Snapfish's prints are lacking in quality. Amazon Photos is close at 17 cents and Shutterfly at 20 cents.

Larger prints are reasonably priced at Walmart Photo. A 5-by-7 costs $1.09; Snapfish and Amazon beat this pricing, charging only 69 cents per 5-by-7. For 8-by-10 prints, you pay $2.94 each at Walmart, whereas most competitors charge more than $3 for that size—although Amazon's 8-by-10s are only $2.09. Walgreens and CVS charge more than $4 for 8-by-10s.

What Gifts and Cards Does Walmart Photo Offer?

Like Shutterfly, Walmart Photo lets you order many different types of objects on which you can print your favorite photographs. In addition to calendars, mugs, and photo books, you can choose blankets, phone cases, puzzles, jewelry, canvas bags, and clothing. It's a large and growing selection that now matches Shutterfly in letting you adorn shower curtains ($70) and neckties ($16) with your pictures.

For photo-embellished greeting cards, Walmart has lower prices than any of its competitors. Single-sided 5-by-7-inch postcard-style cards start at just 48 cents apiece, and you can get folded 5-by-7-inch cards for $1.42 even for a quantity of one—most competitors require higher volumes to get prices as low as that. Walmart also offers premium options like foil printing and linen stock. You can get same-day local pickup service on some holiday cards.

Uploading Pictures to Walmart Photos

The Walmart Photo interface is among the clearest and most functional of any online photo printing service. It offers a lot of ways to add photos to your print set, including from Flickr, Dropbox, and Google Photos, though Facebook and Instagram are missing. You can also drag and drop images from a folder on your desktop or use a file picker to add them. The service accepts only JPG and PNG files—no GIF, HEIC, or TIFF files. The lack of HEIC/HEIF support is bothersome since most smartphones now take advantage of that space-saving format.

After you add your photos, the site creates a gallery based on the upload date. You can always go back and order more photos from these online galleries, view them as an online slideshow, and share them with your email contacts.

If you use Walmart's mobile app and try to order prints, it rather stealthily moves you to a mobile browser version of its website to complete the order. In testing, I hardly noticed it.

Options for Printing in Walmart Photo

When choosing print options, you can select multiple prints and print sizes for each image in one step, and helpfully, the individual price or tally price is always shown. You don't have to go back through the process multiple times for each print size, as you do with Nations Photo Lab. Snapfish works much like Walmart does in this regard.

You get a choice of matte or glossy prints with Walmart, and that's it—no giclée, metallic, borders, or mountings. For those, check out Mpix or Printique. For one-hour pickup, matte is the only choice. During print-size selection, you see an Edit link for each image, which opens a simple editor with cropping, brightness, and tilt options. Here, you can also choose black-and-white or sepia treatments as well as full color. It's not quite the repertoire of photo editing tools offered by some other services, such as Snapfish. If you really need to do a good job editing your photos, do it before you upload them. You can use your own installed software like Lightroom or even the preinstalled image editing apps on macOS, Windows, iPhone, or Android, which are surprisingly powerful.

Recommended by Our Editors

Mpix - Review

Printique - Review

Snapfish - Review

For my order of 25 prints (23 4-by-6s and two 8-by-10s), shipping cost $6.99 for seven-day service, with no expedited options. Still, that's a shorter timeframe than some competitors, and the price is on par with other services. Even better, if your order is $35 or more, shipping is free. The site encourages you to subscribe to Walmart+, which gets you free shipping for everything from the big box retailer. Even before you place the order, you get an estimated arrival time, which is nice and surprisingly unusual.

Walmart Photo Shipment Packaging

My test photo prints arrived just four days after I placed the order online, even though I chose seven-day shipping. Walmart packages pictures in a standard cardboard envelope, with the 8-by-10s in yet another cardboard envelope inside for added protection, with yet another piece of cardboard inside to keep the pictures flat. For such an inexpensive service, I'm impressed by the protectiveness of the packaging. It's better than Amazon Photos, Snapfish, and Shutterfly, which leave the 8-by-10s loose in the outer envelope. It's the top-left envelope in the image.

Though Walmart's packaging isn’t as protective as Nations Photo Lab's and Printique’s sturdy cardboard boxes for the same order, it’s perfectly acceptable. Walmart's shipping package is equivalent to what Shutterfly and Snapfish offer and better than the thin paper envelope that EZPrints uses (the service used by Target).

How Good Are Walmart Photo's Prints?

Like many online photo printing services, Walmart uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which delivers good image quality. I prefer Kodak's thicker and sturdier Endura paper, which Nations Photo Lab and Printique use because it often produces better image quality and is rated to last 100 years (200 years in dark storage). On the back of each photo, Walmart prints an inscrutable number code with the date of the order. I prefer services that print the filename or a title on the back, as Printique and Shutterfly do.

What about the most important thing, the quality and accuracy of the printed images? Our Walmart test pictures show good sharpness and color accuracy. The 4-by-6s don't have any streaking like CVS's prints do, though Walmart's are somewhat softer than the others. Here's a 4-by-6 portrait printed by each of the same-day local pickup options:

You can also see below in the comparison of a landscape shot that the Walmart Photo print is far better than the Snapfish and Shutterfly prints, which are blotchy and distorted with printing artifacts. Walmart's print is also slightly sharper than the photo from Amazon Prints, though they're very close.

Here's a crop of the original image file for comparison:

In the portrait crop below, Walmart Photo really proves itself. It produces more natural colors than Amazon Photo and more that even high-cost Printique. The Shutterfly and Snapfish prints are somewhat sharper, but if you look closely, you can see streaking and distortion in them.

Here's the original image file for comparison:

Fast Photos for Less Money

Walmart Photo provides a clear, capable web interface and its prices are among the lowest around—lower than Amazon and much lower than competing local pickup options. Shipping is fast, but you can also pick up your prints at a nearby store for the same low price. Walmart Photo delivers good image accuracy, particularly in standard 4-by-6 prints, making it our Editors’ Choice winner for affordable printing services. For high-quality photo finishing with more protective packaging but higher pricing, look to our premium photo printing Editors' Choice, Nations Photo Lab. For same-day local pickup, Walgreens Photo is our top choice.