

Picplum (YC S11) aims to make photo printing effortless - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/08/16/point-shoot-print-picplum-aims-to-make-photo-printing-effortless/

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pkteison
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.

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joshkaufman
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.

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mitjak
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?

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Samuel_Michon
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>

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

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ohgodthecat3
I don't often print photos but when I do I usually use walmart or walgreens
online service (though I've found walmart easier to get through). And this is
because they offer the size of pictures I want like larger frames and stuff. I
looked at picplum and just don't see the point because of the limitation of
cheap (quality) 4x6 prints.

Edit: I guess they have added larger photos but walmart is still cheaper and
offers good quality in the mail.

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samstave
I've also used target's printing however the quality is pretty grainy.

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

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jwooden
Picplum acquired the assets of picwing and essentially relaunched the product,
but with the same business model.

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hnriot
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.

