Printroom Review

Company name: Printroom

Website: http://printroom.com/

Printroom is another integrated solution created to solve both frontend and backend photographers’ issues. This company entered the market in year 1999, so it has a solid experience in the industry. Printroom provides photography products, web services and pro lab solutions. The overall number of offered features is divided into groups which make up 3 levels of membership – Classic (Free), Pro ($10/mo or $99 yearly) and Premium ($20/mo and $199/yr).

Choosing a Classic plan you get 300MB image hosting, custom HTML storefronts, print offering, pro photo lab and galleries to display your photos. Pro account gives you an opportunity to create a customizable Flash website, link images to Facebook, create slideshows and gain some more options. Upgrading to the Premium membership level you get premium support, custom photo and gift product templates, e-commerce plugin, possibility to build flash websites for customer events, etc.

There is a live preview of the flash homepage tool available, so you can play with the admin interface right away – no registration required. Of course, I couldn’t miss this opportunity and took a look at the admin panel. At first, I was pleasantly surprised with the editing environment – it’s completely WYSIWYG-based. You just fill in necessary data into the small pop-up window and all changes are immediately displayed on the page, no need to click on “preview” button or switch to another window. That’s pretty cool. However, I was not that impressed by the system’s functionality. In fact, it offers rather limited opportunities: 15 images in the slideshow, 3 content pages, no ability to upload a background image and boring design elements that can be fully customized. Hopefully, the general site building application is more flexible and well-executed.

I browsed several websites built with Printroom application and all of them have very simple, primitive designs. But I guess we should take into account the fact that Printroom is not a full-blown flash photo website CMS, and as a part of integrated photography business solution it works quite well. Unfortunately I didn’t find any testimonial section or forum on their website, it would be very useful to know what professionals think about solution provided by Printroom.
If you are on the lookout for a serious business organizing solution, examine Printroom carefully and decide whether it might fit your needs.