Tesco Online Photo review

Tesco’s Online Photo service is slightly different to getting your prints made in-store, as they’re all produced at a central printing plant. We had our photos posted to us directly, but you can collect them from a number of large Tesco stores if you’d rather waive the delivery charges. Tesco Photo has a maximum file size limit of 6MB, so we had to do some resizing before we could order prints.

Once you’ve uploaded your images to an album you can share them online or select them for printing. By clicking on each photo, you can also access the editing interface, where you can flip, rotate, remove red-eye, apply sepia or black and white effects and crop your images according to a range of pre-defined templates.

You can choose between 6x4in and 7x5in glossy prints as the default options, although other print sizes are available, including 8×6, 10×8, 12×8 and various miniature picture sizes. Larger sizes can be ordered separately as a poster, while a massive range of photo books, mugs, calendars, collages and other novelty items is also available.

Whichever photo print size you choose, you’re encouraged to manually check the cropping of your images – to do this, you have to click through to each, which can be a pain if you have loads of photos. Fortunately, the service’s automatic cropping created no problems with our images, which were correctly proportioned in the first place. Tesco provides online storage and lets you give others access to your albums, but it doesn’t integrate with any other image services such as Flickr.

This graph totals our blind test scores from all the prints in a stacked bar graph, so you can see which service did best overall and where their individual strengths lie – click to enlarge

Unfortunately, Tesco’s prints didn’t win over our judges. The service’s reproduction of our a sunset and the fine detail of a sandy beach were pleasing, but it lost favour with a slightly orange tint to pale skin tones, slight fuzziness and flat colour on other images.

Here’s our natural skin tones test, scanned from the actual print – click to enlarge

You get 50 free prints when you join, but once you’ve worked through the special offers, Tesco is one of the most expensive printing services around. A 6x4in print costs 20p if you order between one at 49 prints. You can make savings if you order in larger quantities, and being able to collect in store can be convenient, but you can get better value from most other retailers, including Foto.com, our Best Buy winner.