As of Mac OS version 10.13.6, that's the latest version of High Sierra, if you go into Photos,
select some photos and then create a new project to print something, like get prints, or book,
or calendar, or cards, you get this message.
The message is warning you that the print projects from Apple are going away.
The date of September 30th suggests that this is going to be gone from Mohava so you won't
be able to print anymore after September 30th of this year.
So what do you do if you still want prints or you want those cool projects.
Well, for awhile now Apple has allowed you to go and get third party extensions for Photos
that allow you to print.
This was a new feature awhile back and now we can see why.
Because Apple planned to pullout of this market and they wanted to enable third parties to
keep extending this.
So let's take a look at what's available.
If we actually go and try to do this and say let's create some prints here there's an Open
App Store button.
The convenient thing about this is it takes you right to the section in the App Store
that has products you can get that allow you to print directly from Photos or order prints
online.
So you can notice there's a small selection here but I predict it will be a much larger
selection.
One of the things keeping companies out of this market is that most people are just going
to go to Apple for prints and books and calendars and things.
But once that's gone people are going to have to go somewhere else.
So there's going to be a much bigger market for these types of apps to thrive and I expect
all the different services that offer prints online to also offer a photos extension.
So I've downloaded a bunch of different ones.
Just kind of at random from what was here.
You can see here open, open, open, and open.
These four that I downloaded.
The other ones I can get.
For the most part they are free because you're basically buying prints from these companies.
So they, of course, can offer the apps for free.
Once you download these, go you hit Get and you hit Install, you don't actually use the
app itself for this.
Instead, when you create a new project here, you see these appear here at the bottom.
So here are the four that I downloaded.
If I wanted to go and use one, I'll just choose this first one here, it creates a new project
and asks me permission to access my photos which is proper and then it shows me all these
different things I can do with this particular service.
Every service is going to be a little bit different.
So FujiFilm Service right here I can order prints, I can do larger things like posters,
I can do mugs, a bunch of different things.
Cards.
A whole bunch of things I can explore.
If I just want to do prints I can click on prints here.
I can select my type of print.
I can see the prices are pretty comparably to what we've been used to.
So we can do 4 X 6 prints.
There are the photos I selected when I started.
I can edit to crop them and things like that.
I can click on the ones I want to order prints.
You can see it adds it to the bag there.
I can go and Continue to Cart.
I can see there I can increase the quantity.
I can checkout.
It's going to ask me for payment information.
I'm going to hit the Done button to Exit out of that.
You can see the project remains there on the side.
We can ty another one of these.
So we'll try this one here.
A lot of them seem to have this interface where you can scroll through it.
I can do phonebooks, I can do calendars, I can do cards.
Let's try this one here.
It has framed prints, gallery wraps, metal wood prints.
So already we're seeing a lot more variety than you find right now in the Apple products.
So that's good.
Shutterfly, of course, is pretty well known online.
But all they have here, so far, are books.
I think we're going to see companies like that adding more potential products.
A lot more companies entering the App Store with their products there so you can print
directly from photos.
I haven't tried any of these.
I haven't tried ordering to see the quality so I'll be interested in hearing feedback
if you use any of these services or tried some of the others.
Over the next six months or so I think I'll probably do some orders with the various companies
and I'll report what I have found in terms of quality.