The Snapfish Photo calendars and mugs were sent to me with the purpose of writing an honest review in exchange for the items. All images and opinions are my own.

Three weeks to go until Christmas day! As usual, though, I am doing great with gifts for the kiddies but pretty behind with gifts for parents/grandparents in comparison. So when Snapfish (a web-based photo sharing and photo printing service owned by Hewlett-Packard) very kindly offered me some credit so I could review some of the products I thought it was a great opportunity to create some photo gifts for the family.

I found the Snapfish website easy to use. I uploaded a bunch of photos that I wanted to use before getting started.

Personalised Photo Calendars

First up, I wanted to create a desk calendar  (£10.99) of the boys for my hubby that could take pride of place on his desk at work. The calendar is 10″x5″ in size and there are a number of templates you can choose from for this. I opted to choose the “elegant” design for this with one background colour. I alternated with a few different layouts which allowed a number of different photos for each month.

Next up was a kitchen calendar (£9.99) for my mother in law. She looks after the boys two days a week so this was going to be one of their “gifts to nanny” for Christmas. The calendar is 5″x11.5″ so perfect for the kitchen. The process was exactly the same as per the desktop calendar where you could choose different layouts and templates.

I was impressed with the quality of both calendars, the card it is printed on is lovely and thick.

Collage Photo Mugs

And last but not least, I created a couple of 11oz collage photo mugs. (£7.99) One which was for my sister (known as Yee Yee by my boys) Again, the process of choosing a template and number of photos for the mug was quite easy. You choose the number of photos you would like on your mug and it automatically generates a grid system for you. You can then keep refreshing this so the images change around and have different prominence.

What I really would have liked here, would have been the same flexibility as per the calendars with being able to choose different layouts depending on the number of photos you want to show and being able to click on each individual grid item to allow me to edit the photos manually. I was disappointed that the preview only showed a flat graphic of the photos you had chosen and you were not able to see a preview of how the mug would look with the photos on. I used a competitors site for photo mugs last year and found this visual really useful.

There was a good colour option for the outside of your mug but very limited interior colour options (only yellow, red and blue) and again, if you chose an interior colour for your mug you could not preview this to see what the final mug would actually look like. On a positive note, the mugs were a good quality and size.

All the Snapfish items were packaged well and arrived very promptly. (mine were delivered within a week of ordering)

Verdict

I know all the items I ordered will go down well with the recipients and I will no doubt use Snapfish again it would be great however, if they took note and improved on the options for the photo mugs.

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