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Taking pictures is easy with a digital camera, and of course the great advantage over film is that you can shoot as many photos as you want at no extra cost - at least, until you run out of hard disk space. Getting your snaps printed, however, whether to stick in the family album or hang on the wall, can be slightly trickier - and a lot more expensive. Using a typical inkjet printer, each photo you output could cost you around 20p or more in ink and paper. Then there's the time it takes to get them all printed...

A better and usually cheaper option, especially for larger quantities, is to get someone else to do the work for you. Digital photo printing services are all over theplace these days, and while you'll find plenty on your local high street, it's even more convenient to upload your photos to an online service without leaving the comfort of yourPC, then wait for the prints to arrive a few days later in the post.

Not only will you save time and money, you'll get even better results than you could at home. While today's inkjets produce excellent 'photo quality' output, these services are based on equipment that really does give photo quality, because it uses papers and processes derived from traditional photo printing. These 'minilab' systems, mostly made by Fuji and Kodak, use lasers to activate the chemicals in photographic paper. So you start off with a digital image, and end up with the same physical product as if you'd had a film processed, with the same glossy finish,

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sharpness and durability.

We sent a batch of digital photos to each of eight online printing services to see how easy they were to use, how the quality of their prints compared, and which offered the best value for money.

Uploading your photos

To get your photos printed, you first need to upload your files. This can usually be done through your web browser (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), often with a Java applet or ActiveX control that loads within the web page and lets you choose the files you want. In case you have an old or unusual browser that won't cope with this, there's often a alternative plain HTML option to simplify things even further, letting you upload one file at a time.

Alternatively, many services provide an application that you can download to your PC. Run this and you can sort out the files you want and organise your order more efficiently.

An even simpler option, in theory, is to order prints directly from Windows. From the Windows XP Desktop, open My Computer, go into My Documents, and open the My Pictures folder. With the task pane visible on the left of the window (if you see a folder list instead, click the Folders button at the top to get rid of it), you should see an option labelled 'Order prints online'. This opens the Online Print Ordering Wizard. Here you can select pictures and then choose a service to print them.

The catch is that the Wizard doesn't provide many features and you only get a choice of three suppliers: Bonusprint, Jessops.com, and ExtraFilm.com. It's hard to see much point in using this when you can shop around far more companies on the web.

Photo storage and sharing is now a standard feature of most services, so rather than just uploading a set of image files for each order you can keep a whole collection of photos online, organise them into albums, and request prints of selected pictures when you want them. Some services offer a downloadable application that can upload pictures to your online albums every time you plug your camera into your PC.