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Apple Is Discontinuing Its Photo Printing Services—Here Are 7 Alternatives

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Print projects photo

I have some sad news for you if you used Apple’s photo printing services. Apple is discontinuing these services, which enabled you to create and order physical prints, cards, calendars, and books from within the Photos app on the Mac. If you’re building such a project right now, be sure to place your order before September 30th, 2018. After that, Apple is directing users to download a Photos Project Extension from the Mac App Store. You’ll see this dialog whenever you click a project in Photos.

Print projects dialog

When you click the Open App Store button, Photos opens the App Store app and shows available Photos Project Extensions. Most of these extensions are free, since they’ll make their money when you order projects.

These extensions aren’t exact replacements for Apple’s projects, so let’s look briefly at what they provide.

Mimeo Photos
The extension or service that comes closest to providing the same products and features as Apple’s print projects is Mimeo Photos, which can create cards, calendars, and books. It offers a wide array of themes.

Print projects Mimeo

Motif
Motif looks quite similar to Mimeo Photos, also enabling you to create cards, calendars, and books with selected photos, and it comes from RR Donnelley, the company that was previously Apple’s partner for print projects. It doesn’t offer as many themes or options as Mimeo Photos, but it has a better interface, which is always nice.

Shutterfly
Even though the popular Shutterfly photo service’s Web site lets you go beyond the basics to put your photos on a vast number of objects, such as pillows, candles, and trivets, the company’s Photos extension is limited to photo books. Happily, it provides quite a few different sizes and bindings, and numerous themes for each.

Print projects Shutterfly

Fujifilm Prints & Gifts
The Fujifilm Prints & Gifts extension lets you order prints, cards, wall art, mugs and drinkware, magnets, T-shirts, puzzles, iPhone cases, and much more. However, it has a non-standard interface (basically the company’s Web site), and it seems to crash a lot according to some people.

Print projects Fujfilm

Mpix
Although Mpix seems to focus on prints, if you scroll down in the project list, the final option is Browse Mpix, which provides more possibilities, including photo books, calendars, collages, foil art prints, posters, keychains, magnets, playing cards, and business cards. Confusingly, with some of these items, Photos acts as nothing more than a window onto Mpix’s Web site, with no awareness of the photos you’ve selected.

Print projects Mpix

WhiteWall
WhiteWall focuses entirely on prints, with high-end choices for exotic papers and options for mounting and framing. Supported sizes range from 8″ x 6″ up to 48″ x 36″. Unfortunately, the WhiteWall prices seemed high (a framed photo was between $130 and $530, depending on size), and once you select a particular paper or frame choice, there is no way to try another with the same photo without starting another project.

Print projects WhiteWall

Wix
Unlike all the others, the Wix extension doesn’t put photos on physical products at all. Instead, it’s designed to create on-screen photo albums for Web sites designed with the Wix service. As such, it’s potentially extremely useful for Wix users, but not at all for everyone else.

Print projects Wix

It’s too bad that Apple is getting out of the print project business since the interfaces from these extensions tend not to be as good as what we’re used to from Apple. But if you like making yourself a calendar every year, you’ll probably do fine with Mimeo Photos or Motif, and the rest of the extensions do extend Photos’ printing capabilities in a big way.

Search for Nearly Anything in Your Photos Library

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Searching Photos collage photo

Apple’s Photos app on the Mac can identify thousands of different objects in your photos. This makes it easy to find photos based on their content. Some of what you can find include objects (cars and trains), scenery (beaches and forests), location, and even some events (weddings and parades). This is both big fun and useful for those times when you can’t remember when you took a photo, but do remember what’s in it, like a cat, camera, or carousel. To perform a search like this, type the search term into the Search field on the right side of the Photos toolbar. From the list that appears, choose the Category result. In macOS 10.13 High Sierra’s version of Photos, you can filter your results from the Showing menu at the upper right of the window. I will say that this feature isn’t perfect, so you may see some odd results or miss some photos, but it’s way faster than browsing manually!

Searching Photos cat

Automatically Straighten Photos in the Photos App on your iPhone

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Straighten

We’ve all taken photos where the horizon was crooked. I seem to do it more often than I want in all honesty. Well did you know that the Photos app on the iPhone (and iPad) can straighten these automatically? All you need to do is open the photo in the Photos app. From their tap on Edit and then tap on the Crop/Rotate tool. When you do this, Photos will automatically straighten the photo for you. You can go in and fine tune it if you’d like, but I find that Photos does a pretty good job of this on it’s own.

iCloud Photo Library Users: Do Not Turn Off iCloud

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Dont turn off iCloud photo

You can file this warning under “unless it’s absolutely necessary.” If you use iCloud Photo Library on your Mac, which I personally think is great, I recommend you don’t sign out from iCloud. Also, don’t deselect the iCloud Photo Library checkbox in either the Photos options of the iCloud pane of System Preferences or in the iCloud preferences in Photos itself. Why not? Because, when you re-enable iCloud or iCloud Photo Library, Photos will re-upload all your photos, which could take days. (It’s not really re-uploading all of them, but even just resyncing will take a long time.) Worse, if you don’t have enough space in iCloud for your entire Photos library again, you’ll have to upgrade to a larger plan temporarily, resync, and then downgrade to your previous plan. Apple will refund you the cost of the upgrade, but you’ll have to work with support to get reimbursed.

ICloud Photo Library progress count

Tutor Tips

Tutor Tip: Viewing Photos in Moments, Collections, and Years on the iPhone

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In this Tutor Tip we look at how you view your photos in Moments, Collections, and Years with the Photos app on the iPhone. Looking for a photo or video that was taken a year or two ago? Find them by looking at your Years. How about a special moment? The Photos app automatically groups your photos and videos together in moments, collections, and years so you can easily find them at any time. See how this work in this Tutor Tip.

This Tutor Tip is part of Tutor for Photos for iPhone. Take me to the tutorial!