Ask HN: Elderly Friendly Photo Printing Sites?

[jerrac]

Hey, just a shot in the dark, but does anyone know of any good photo product sites, like Shutterfly, that have user interfaces that are elderly friendly?

My mother likes to get cards and other things using her photos, but she is continually having horrible experiences with the sites she's tried. And every time I go to help, I find UI's that are just not well designed. Sometimes I have to switch her over to Chrome, other times nothing makes it better.

Today, Walmart's site wouldn't even let me try to log her into her account in Chrome, just kept showing me "are you human" pages. And in Firefox, their photo app is clearly not working very well. The preview for the Christmas card was tiny until I switched her system font size from 150% to 100% scaling. Then it got bigger. And Firefox console was full of security warnings.

Shutterfly is not very good either, she consistently has to redo entire projects (that take her hours to put together) before it works, and it's hit or miss on if it works in Firefox or Chrome.

Are there any photo printing services out there that have UIs that: A) Work. B) Were designed with the elderly in mind?

Thanks!

[solardev]

Does she use any sort of cloud photo storage already?

If she has a Mac, she can print them straight from the macOS Photos app: https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/order-professional-pr... (but not from an iPhone, apparently)

If she uses Google Photos, she can print it right from the web interface (just select a few photos or albums and click the order prints icon) and she can checkout straight from there and have it shipped to her house. It's also available from the Google Photos app right on an Android phone.

If she's not using anything like that already, it might be a lot harder :( Maybe she can just make shared albums to send to you, and you can order prints for her?

[jerrac → solardev]

I had wondered about Google Photos. She does use that, but I've never looked into what they offer for prints.

Thanks for the tip.

[jerrac → jerrac]

Google Photo seems to only offer normal prints, canvas prints, and photo books.

[solardev → jerrac]

Ah, bummer. Guess you'll have to do the prints for her? Should be easy if she just makes a shared "print these" album with you.

[aynyc]

You have basically 3 options:

1. Your local pharmacies with photo services or FEDEX/UPS stores. You won't get high end photos, but good enough. You'll also pay more but there is someone to help the elderly.

2. Spend the money and buy your own printer and ink. I did that for my parents, they are happy as clams.

3. Have your mother send you the photos and you do the work.

[jerrac → aynyc]

Thanks for the reply. It's not just prints, though. Cards, photobooks, and other items are on the list. So it really does need to be usable for her.

[Paradigm2020]

From personal experience with older parents... Some very bad UX on the website of Google photos (they ended up starting again twice because they thought it had been lost... This was 8months ago so might be better now)

The (android, no experience with iOS) app works better in general (they are definitely prioritizing UX + features there) but would also depend on your mom's eye sight etc.

If you're up for the (small) effort it's easy to make shared albums and you could just do the final step of purchasing the prints and getting them sent to her home.

Best of luck !

Anyway best of luck !