Photo processing

Kristen has been doing a lot of scrapbooking recently and rather than use up a lot of her parents ink we decided to use Samsclub to print some photo's off (as the price is 17 cents a picture for 6*4" photos, 1 hr processing with pick up at the store. 11c for mail order.) The quality of the pictures is not too bad but as you'll see there has been some cropping of the photo which Kristen was not expecting. This has ruined a couple of the photos as having the top of your head missing does not make a nice portrait.
Here we have the original picture as uploaded from the computer (Click on the thumbnail for a large version of the file)



However the version that came back from Sams club had been cropped to the following image.(I've cropped the original photo to get this image shown as I don't have access to a scanner at the moment)


(Yes I know the cropped version looks bigger but that is due to the proportions of the thumbnail pictures).
In this particular shot it doesn't matter too much although the heads have been chopped off a little. This cropping would be a major drawback to using this facility. At least some other services ask you where you want to crop the photo.
I've got some codes for 36 free photos with winkflash so I'm going to try these at 16c a photo and Dimeprints are 10c per copy. In the end I created a spreadsheet to work out which was going to be the cheapest for a certain number of photos (as the postage costs make some services cheaper than others at different quantities). Of course this all assumes that the cropping is user controllable and the quality of the pictures are the same. I'm going to send some of the samsclub pictures to the other services so that I can do a comparison.