It may not be January anymore, but you still need a calendar to see you through 2018. So why not create one filled with your favorite photos? There are dozens of calendar-creation services, but not all of them are created equal when it comes to making a great looking calendar with a minimum of fuss.
Many of these services often offer promotions and deals for calendars and other photo products—as much as 50 percent off, in some cases—so be sure to compare their discounted rates before choosing one for your needs.
Latest News & Updates (July 2018)
Apple Photo is our pick for the best value, because it produced a very attractive calendar for a reasonable price. However, Apple is discontinuing its photo printing service as of September 30, 2018; if you are using Apple Photos to put together photo calendars, Apple recommends downloading a third-party app that includes a Photos Projects extension; currently, of our favorite services, only Shutterfly has an extension for Photos.
Photo Calendar Services Ranked
1.
Shutterfly ( on From $12.99)
(9/10 stars, Editors' Choice winner) - Shutterfly Review
2.
Apple Photo ( on From $19.99)
(8/10 stars, Editors' Choice winner)
3.
Mixbook ( on From $24.99)
(8/10 stars, Editors' Choice winner)
4.
Picaboo ( on From $24.99)
(7/10 stars)
5.
Snapfish ( on From $9.99)
(5/10 stars)
6.
Costco Photo ( on From $16.99)
(5/10 stars)
7.
Amazon Print ( on From $14.99)
(5/10 stars)
8.
Walmart Photo ( on From $9.99)
(3/10 stars)
How We Test and Rate Photo Calendar Services
In rating the calendar-creation software, we used the following criteria:
- Ease of use
- User interface & workflow
- Functionality
- Creative flexibility
- Quality of templates, clip art, layouts and backgrounds
When we had all our printed calendars, we gathered a jury of print and photography experts to rate them, based on the following criteria:
- Overall appeal and quality of the physical calendar
- Photo quality
- Color and skin tones
- Dynamic range and exposure
- Focus and clarity
- Balancing of the diverse pictures
To keep the jury's judging blind, each calendar was identified by a number rather than the company's name. However, some calendars had the vendors' names printed on the last page. So we discouraged the jury from looking on the back of the calendars until after the judging.
Since the pictures are the whole point behind creating and sharing calendars, we gave the greatest weight to photo quality. We also took into consideration the quality of the paper stock and the cost of the calendars.
Editor's choice
Shutterfly
Best Overall
The overall quality of Shutterfly's printed calendar was extremely appealing, with a good weight, vellum-like paper, and a very nice level of customization. Shutterfly's calendar software, however, was occasionally nonintuitive, and its content and functionality wasn't quite as comprehensive as Mixbook's.
Editor's choice
Apple Photo
Best Value
Editor's choice
Mixbook
Best Software
Other Photo Book Services Tested
Creating a calendar in Picaboo is just fun. The interface makes it easy to be creative, even though the software isn't as feature-rich as Mixbook's. Photo quality in our printed calendar, however, was uneven.
Picaboo
Snapfish's calendar software has a generous supply of content and is flexible when it came to design, but nothing about it is particularly great. Similarly, our Snapfish printed calendar was unimpressive, with jagged type and photos that weren't particularly well-balanced.
Snapfish
Costco tries to compromise between simplicity and customization for its calendar software, hoping to satisfy all users. Unfortunately, simplicity won out, resulting in inflexibility, limited functionality and sparse content. The photo quality of the resulting calendar ranges from nice to poor.
Costco Photo
Amazon Print uses Snapfish's calendar software. However, Amazon has fewer templates, layouts, backgrounds and clip art. Like Snapfish, our Amazon printed calendar was unexceptional, and had poorly balanced photo quality and unappealing type.
Amazon Print
Walmart doesn't appear to care much about the photo calendars it offers. The software is restrictive and severely limited, and the printed calendar was boring, with the least attractive photos among the services we tested.
Walmart Photo
How We Test Photo Calendar Services
When creating a photo calendar, most people assemble a diverse collection of photographs, taken at different times of the year under a variety of lighting conditions and with various devices. This can be challenging to calendar printing services, requiring them to balance the different exposures and color temperatures so all the pictures will look good together.
We then designed a 12-month calendar with these photos. To test how flexible and creative each service is, we included angled text, overlapping elements, and rotated and resized photos and chip art. When creating the calendar, we sought out the best templates, layouts, clip art, text and backgrounds each service offered. However, some interfaces were more difficult to navigate and had libraries that weren't searchable, which made it problematic to find the content we sought for our design.
Credit: Tom's Guide
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During checkout I was informed that calendars are "out of stock" and "unavailable." Why didn't they informed me before I invest 4 hours on my project?
I put a call in Shutterfly Customer Service and put my telephone number in queue for a return call. It's been 5 hours and they have not returned my call.
Access to my calendar project the I worked on all morning is now "unavailable."
DO NOT BUY FROM SHUTTERFLY! They do not respect their customer time and don't return calls.