The best photo calendars in 2024

Mixbook photo calendar 2024
(Image credit: Future)

With calendar apps clogging our digital screens, is there still room for a physical calendar in our lives? Virtual calendars are certainly handy organizational tools, but there’s something impersonal about them. A real calendar you make yourself, on the other hand, allows you to customize it with your favorite photos, unique designs, and other personal touches. 

A physical calendar is also a great way to help visualize the time ahead, from events coming this week to holidays that are approaching faster than you realize. And, let’s face it, a beautiful calendar on your wall or (physical) desktop, is also a piece of art, whereas an app is just an app.

Making your own photo calendar is not hard but it helps to pick the right service. To help you find a company to meet your calendar-making needs, we tested the design process and production quality for five top printing services – Shutterfly, Snapfish, Vistaprint, Mixbook, and Printique. For testing purposes, we created centerfold wall-hanging calendars in similar sizes with similar photos for our comparison. 

Read on to find out which calendar company we liked the best and the least. At the end of each section, click the link to read each review in full. You can also learn about  our picks for the best photo books and best photo cards.

Recent updates

Costco has shut down its own photo book and calendar printing service, but is now offering a similar service via Shutterfly. Costco members will receive 51% off regularly-priced Shutterfly orders, plus free shipping on orders over $49. There are some exceptions, and you must be a Costco member in order to take advantage of this offer.

The best photo calendar services today

Why you can trust Tom's Guide Our writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what's best for you. Find out more about how we test, analyze, and rate.

Best overall

Mixbook photo calendar 2024

(Image credit: Future)

1. Mixbook

Top quality with excellent software to realize your visions

Specifications

Starting price for 12 x 12-inch centerfold calendar: $28.99
Calendar size options: 11 x 8.5, 12 x 12, 14 x 11 inches

Reasons to buy

+
Excellent photo quality
+
Well constructed calendar with thick paper
+
Intuitive software that’s fun to use
+
Helpful live chat support directly in design software

Reasons to avoid

-
Myriad of options can be overwhelming

Mixbook’s calendars were in the top-tier of all the photo calendar services we tested. Although Mixbook’s calendar had a flat finish to its cover and pages, our photos really popped thanks to the spot-on color rendering and decent overall sharpness.

Our images included a variety of landscapes, cityscapes and candid portraits in the Tuscany region of Italy. Mixbook’s calendars were on the same level as its photo books; subjects, from portraits to landscapes, were consistently pleasing and accurate. Similarly, writing on the calendar grid was crisp, with no smudging.

If you’re intimidated about designing a calendar, Mixbook takes out the stress with clear and fun-to-use software that helps make the process a breeze. If you get stuck, Mixbook even has a live chat feature. We also appreciated the variety of ways to customize your calendar including 139 design templates and tools to adjust borders, drop shadows and image opacity.

Mixbook's calendar is a bit higher priced than some of the competition, however. It's the second-priciest offering behind Shutterfly’s, but we felt that the quality and usability of Mixbook’s calendars were worth the cost.

If you order a photo book from Mixbook, be sure to check out Mixbook's shipping information and deadlines

Read our full Mixbook review

Best photo quality

printique photo calendar 2024

(Image credit: Future)

2. Printique

The highest quality, but software could use work

Specifications

Starting price for 10 x 10, 12-month centerfold calendar: $25.99
Calendar size options: 3.74 x 8.27, 5.43 x 12 inches (desktop); 6 x 6, 8 x 8, 10 x 10 inches (centerfold); 12 x 18 inches (top hanging)

Reasons to buy

+
Best photo quality
+
Great for portraits thanks to excellent color, skintones, and contrast
+
Competitively priced

Reasons to avoid

-
Software was confusing and felt dated compared to rivals
-
Creating basic calendar was surprisingly difficult
-
Calendar has flimsiest cover and pages of all we reviewed

Printique is still the top dog when it comes to photo calendar print quality. It’s software, however, is a slog to use, which drops Printique to second place for calendars. In particular, we had a tough time placing photos correctly into the basic “Build your own” design with the images often overlapping with the grid of the calendar. So, instead, we tried Printique’s Modern style template, and the result was a gorgeous, professional-looking calendar filled with our photos from a recent trip to Italy. But it wasn’t what we initially wanted, which was disappointing.

Printique’s calendar pricing though was a pleasant surprise. We paid $34.99 for a 12x18-inch, wall hanging calendar, which was less expensive than some of the smaller calendars we ordered from the other companies. 

Given the outstanding print quality of the calendar, we were a taken aback with how thin the pages were, particularly the flimsy front cover. While we’re looking forward to displaying the calendar in 2024, hopefully the pages – which were the thinnest of all the calendars – survive being flipped throughout the year. Otherwise, Printique’s calendar was the most visually striking of all we created. 

When ordering a photo book, be sure to check out Printique's shipping information and deadlines, so you know how long to expect before it arrives.

Read our full Printique review.

Best value

vistaprint photo calendar 2024best value awards badge

(Image credit: Future)

3. Vistaprint

The best value photo calendar

Specifications

Starting price for an 11.5 x 14-inch premium calendar: $27.99
Calendar size options: 11.5 x 8, 17 x 11 inch (top binding); 17 x 11 inch, 22.5 x 14.5 inch (top binding)

Reasons to buy

+
Good quality
+
Basic but highly functional software
+
Affordable pricing with frequent discounts

Reasons to avoid

-
Overwhelming number of print-on-demand services 
-
Dull and dated web interface

Vistaprint’s calendar was more impressive than we expected, given how affordable it was. The cover photo nailed the color of a street scene we shot in Italy with the yellow of the girl’s dress and the yellow of the building behind her rendered accurately — it was nearly identical to how it looked in the original image.

The photos above the monthly grids inside the calendar were consistently good, matching the quality of our first and second place calendar finishers, Mixbook and Printique, respectively. Our only criticism is that reds were oversaturated in the calendar, which gave a flushed look to people's faces. 

We also liked the build quality of the calendar; it had a simple but sturdy spiral binding and the cover and inside pages were pleasantly thick. However, the pages had a shiny finish, which looked nice but caused ink and markers to smear when we wrote on it. Most surprising, though, was that Vistaprint's calendar handled black and white imagery much better than its photo book; in the former, a shot of a waterfall looked stunning, with dramatic contrast and tons of detail, but in the book, it looked washed out.

Read our full Vistaprint review.

Other services we tested

shutterfly photo calendar 2024

(Image credit: Future)

4. Shutterfly

Specifications

Starting price for an 8 x 11-inch, 12-month centerfold calendar: $44.99
Calendar size options: 5 x 7 inch (easel); 5 x 11 inch (desktop) 8 x 11, 12-12 inch (centerfold)

Reasons to buy

+
User-friendly software
+
Easy to share online projects with others
+
Massive selection of stickers/clipart

Reasons to avoid

-
Mediocre calendar quality
-
Slow to load images for projects
-
High price (for what you get)

Shutterfly offers one of the smoothest, low-stress experiences for creating a calendar thanks to its powerful yet user-friendly software. We thought the company offered a good compromise between providing full control over a calendar project and not overloading you with too much information. However, we found its interface was a bit laggy, most noticeably when we placed images in a layout; often a few seconds would elapse before we saw the picture. 

Also disappointing was the substandard print and build quality of Shutterfly’s calendar. Of the services we tested, it finished second to last: Colors were mediocre color, highlights were washed out, and overall it looked flat and faded. The detail and sharpness in our cover and calendar page images was not bad though considering some of the exposure issues.

The metal ring binding of our wall-hanging calendar felt cheap; we're not sure if it would hold up for an entire year. On the other hand, the actual monthly date grids were sharp and easy to read. The smooth matte surface of the grid pages was also easy to write on, with little to no bleeding for ink or magic marker. So, while there’s nothing that special about Shutterfly’s calendar, it’s highly functional. 

Read our full Shutterfly review.

snapfish photo calendar 2024

(Image credit: Future)

5. Snapfish

Specifications

Starting price for a 13 x 10-inch, 12-month calendar: $32.99
Calendar size options: 8.5 x 11, 11.5 x 14, 12 x 12 inch (wall calendar); 9 x 12 (premium stationary wall calendar); 10 x 5 inch (desktop calendar); 11 x 5 inch (premium desktop calendar); 6 x 8 inch (woodblock desk calendar)

Reasons to buy

+
Easiest to use software
+
Clearest layout process
+
Good pricing

Reasons to avoid

-
Worst quality for calendars
-
Overexposure issues in brighter areas of images
-
Thin paper
-
Distracting side pop-ups with deal info

Snapfish’s software was so easy and user-friendly that we wanted to like this service more than we did. The process of creating calendars with Snapfish was so pleasant, we expected the finished product to be equally satisfying. It was not. In terms of image quality and construction, Snapfish’s calendar finished in last place.

Like its photo book, which also finished in last place, the calendar’s colors were somewhat muted overall. We used images we shot during a summer trip to Italy for our calendar and there was a disappointing lack of vibrancy on the calendar pages. This was particularly true for the cover shot, which was of a street scene in Italy. A girl's bright yellow dress and the building behind her lacked vibrancy, and came across as a pale pastel. The same was true for the dull treatment of the various Italian streetscapes and landscapes throughout the calendar.

The build quality of the wall calendar itself was ok if unremarkable. Pages were thin, and while the metal spiral binding was better than the rickety one from Shutterfly, it didn’t seem durable. Overall, the calendar reminded us of something you might get for free from the bank – functional, but not particularly attractive or impressive.

Read our full Snapfish review

How we test photo calendar services

For this evaluation, we created similar centerfold wall calendars from the five services we tested, Mixbook, Printique, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Vistaprint. While creating our calendars, we picked layouts and designs that were similar across the five services as well. For four of the five, we used blank “build your own,” calendars. The only exception was Printique, where we picked the service’s Modern template because we had issues with the “build your own” interface.

For photos, I used my own portraits, landscapes, and cityscapes shot in natural light from a summer trip to Tuscany in Italy. The three main factors the services were judged on were software, image quality, and value. For the calendar-making software, we considered both the levels of customization offered and the ease-of-use. 

For image quality, we compared photos across the selection of calendars, as well as against the original digital images displayed on a MacBook Air retina display. Criteria for judging included cover quality, paper quality, color, skin tones, contrast, and sharpness/detail. For value, we took into account both the price of the photo calendars and the level of quality of the finished product. So, for instance, a good quality calendar that cost a low price would get a higher value score than a poor quality calendar at a similar price. The same value scale was used for more expensive calendars in our testing.

More from Tom's Guide

Dan Havlik

Dan Havlik has worked in the photo industry for over decades and is currently editor-in chief of Wild Eye (www.wildeyemagazine.com), a new magazine devoted to the celebration of nature, wildlife, and underwater photography. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Outdoor Photographer and Shutterbug magazines. He has been an editor and writer for a variety of other publications and websites including Photo District News (PDN), Rangefinder, Wired, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Consumer Reports, Maxim, Men’s Journal, Imaging Resource, and LAPTOP. Dan is also an avid runner with three marathons under his belt and has written fitness reviews, including guides to the best running shoes and GPS watches, for Business Insider.