Picplum (YC S11) aims to make photo printing effortless

I sent my family some photos from Picplum recently. I was very satisfied with the quality of the photos, but the experience wasn't as nice as this article, and it cost about five times more than their competition. At a 5x price premium for 4x6 (and 5x5 Instagram prints are double the 4x6 price), I'm not sure there could possibly be enough ease of use to turn me into a regular customer.

And I didn't see all this fantastic ease of use - the uploader got stuck and did not display the result a few times, and the browse has no good clear-to-me way to view large images before selecting and uploading them, so if you have 2 shots of the same thing you have to tab out to an external photo viewer to pick the better one. I ended up doing all my picture selection in picasa then hunting for filenames in picplum.

I liked the quality but I just wasn't impressed enough to justify using it regularly. Apparently they have some good ideas like you can set it up where you e-mail pictures in and they batch them up and mail them out to your family, but that just seems to me like a way to rack up another cell phone sized bill each month.

I'm a happy Picplum user, and have been since launch. Here's why I'm a customer: when I take a photo of my daughter on my iPhone, sending it to Picplum means automatically delivering prints to my parents and grandparents without any additional thought or effort on my part. Snap, send, done.

My wife and I both run businesses, so the probability of us going to Costco, printing five sets of photos, packaging them, applying the right amount of postage, and dropping them off at the post office every single month is 0%.

Picplum is the difference between my family receiving many photos every month vs. none at all.

So, he's comparing importing photos from Flickr to drag and dropping pictures onto Picplum? Wouldn't a more fair comparison be to go directly to Snapfish and upload the photos to it?

Or, if you have a Mac, you can just order your prints from within iPhoto.

It’s at least as convenient and 2 to 4 times cheaper.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/print-products.html#prints

Photo printing for me at home is already effortless, its just costly. I prefer a method for far cheaper prints.

isnt http://www.picwing.com/ on the front page of ycombinator? Doesn't that do this?

it may be marginally easier to drag/drop photos to picplum, but its 3-4x more expensive than using Costco's photo web service. And some of those extra steps with Flickr or other sites are necessary, for example selecting the paper finish and border style.

This is optimizing something that isn't broken. It may not be as slick, but I'm loosing features and paying three to four times as much for the privilege by using PicPlum.