Snapfish is a web-based photo sharing and photo printing service owned by District Photo. Snapfish is based in San Francisco, California. Members can upload files for free, and are given unlimited photo storage.
History
Snapfish was launched in 1999 by business partners Rajil Kapoor, Bala Parthasarathy, Suneet Wadhwa, and Shripati Acharya. Ben Nelson joined soon thereafter as corporate development operations lead, to become CFO and later president.
In 2005, Snapfish was bought by HP. While HP did not disclose the acquisition sum, a Merrill Lynch report estimated that HP may have paid between $300 and 400 million for Snapfish, while Snapfish’s revenue was less than $100 million. Snapfish co-founder Raj Kapoor confirmed in a 2011 interview that the acquisition price was $300 Million.
In 2004, Snapfish opened a physical retail concept store in Alexandria, Virginia, but they later closed the retail store.
As of 2007, Snapfish claimed to have 40 million members and to host 1 billion digital pictures. In August 2013, Snapfish announced on their local websites (and through a mailing to members) that they were shutting down the service in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and Spain. They advised existing users to use Pixum and Photojaanic as a replacement service.
In April 2015, HP reached an agreement to sell Snapfish back to District Photo. Under the terms of the sale, HP allowed the company to continue to use its printing services.
During a website conversion in 2016 Snapfish had a data loss while converting to their new web system. Photos prior to January 2014 were unable to be migrated to the new website system. Snapfish said that although some photo albums were recovered, others will remain empty. Typically Snapfish has three versions of images: high resolution, low resolution, and printable images. Both the high resolution and low resolution were lost and the backup files for the printable images was not recoverable.
Features
Most Snapfish features are free. However, Snapfish sells prints and personalized merchandise on its website. Prior to 26 January 2012, Snapfish charged a per-image fee for downloads of high resolution or original copies of uploaded images
Sharing
Snapfish members can share photo albums, individual photos, animated Snapshows, Group Rooms or Snapfish products. Members can share via email, link URL, and to various other web services such as Facebook, Blogger and MySpace. Like Facebook and unlike Flickr, a Snapfish account is required to view shared photos. An invitation sent from a member to view their photos on Snapfish would require the recipient to create a Snapfish account before viewing.
Photo products
Snapfish collects revenue from personalized photo products such as prints, photo books, cards and mugs. Snapfish members can personalize their products in several ways such as adding their photos and, in some cases, adding captions or designed templates. Depending on the product, Snapfish USA supports retail pickup at Meijer, Walgreens and CVS.
See also
- Snapfish Lab, a service of HP Labs
References
External links
- Official website
