Winkflash

Uploaded 1700 photos of my wedding and honeymoon. Opted for Winkflash because a 12 x 12 100 page book was possible. Worked for several months selecting and editing photos, selecting layouts and inserting text. Got to about the 80th page and project would not open. Contacted support and the response was that if a photobook is loaded with mass photos, it will freeze. Support suggested that I start a new book at this point. Really? There is no reason or incentive to choose Winkflash if I have to begin again. If Winkflash can not support. 12 x 12 book with 100 pages and the possible layouts have up to 9 photos each (=900 photos), then it should not even be a choice. Either limit the pages or the number of photos or both. I WASTED MONTHES! If you want a substandard business that offers mediocre products and services, you have found all that you desire. Go for it. I applaud your satisfaction with low expectations.

We used to order prints *******@Winkflash. #NeverAgain. They defaced a pic of my daughter & won't even respond to emails requesting a reprint.
They'd get zero stars if that was an option.

If I could give a 0 star review I would. I ordered 2 8X10 photo books as a Christmas gift that Winkflash shows shipped on 12/11/14 and they still have not arrived. There is no telephone support line that works for Winkflash and I just made my 4th attempt via their email support. I heard back on my first attempt on 12/23 and they said USPS had my order. The only thing that was delivered on 12/24 were pictures that were part of the order. The 2 photobooks have not arrived and it's 1/3/15 and I've made 3 additional support attempts to reach Winkflash via email support with NO RESPONSE. I've used Winkflash's services for almost 5 years as a loyal customer. Something is COMPLETELY MESSED UP WITH THEIR SUPPORT SERVICE.

I was very unhappy with my one and only Winkflash experience. The web site is clumsy and cumbersome to use. Uploading photos is horrendously slow and often fails, especially if you do anything more than 50 MB at a time. Anyone that takes even moderate resolution photos knows that 50 MBs is not many photos! The Winkflash photo uploader recommends uploading no more than 200 MB at a time, but even when I tried 75 MB the uploads repeatedly failed. It was very time consuming to sit there and upload 50 MB at a time. It seemed to be uploading at 50-100 KB per second. After all this frustration I had issues with my order when it arrived. Customer service replied very quickly to my 3 attempts to discuss the situation with them, sometimes within an hour, but the replies were short and seemed to be copied and pasted. My questions and concerns were not specifically addressed at all. Dealing with customer service was not a pleasant experience. The quality of the items and prints I ordered was average. Not bad but not impressive either. I give them credit for printing and shipping the items quite fast, but at somewhat high shipping costs. I will not be using Winkflash again.

When they offer their 4x6 photos for $0.10 but shipping is $23.97... WTH... ummm NO! I will definitely shop elsewhere...

I wrote to Winkflash saying that I couldn't get into my account of thousands of pictures and a book on our Theater Company. I explained that the ID demanded an email while the old Winkflash only needed an ID name (which I used). Again: I DID NOT HAVE AN EMAIL ID!
This was their response:
We would first like to offer our sincere apologies.

As you may know, in August 2014 the previous Winkflash owners shut down their website and went suddenly out of business. Overnight their entire operation was completely down and there was no way to access or retrieve any photos.

However, after a few months we were able to acquire some of the old Winkflash assets and with great effort and expense, were to save many tens of millions of photosbut unfortunately, not all. We are very sorry for all of the trouble, stress and confusion this has caused you.

As of now, we no longer have access to the servers in the former owners datacenter. We are truly very sorry and have put in countless hours and did our bestbut because of the quick shutdown of the previous ownersthe window of recovery was much shorter than expected.

No words can ever be sufficient for the loss of your memories. Please accept this small token of a $50 credit. If you are interested in taking advantage of this credit, please contact us again with your WinkFlash email account and we will add it to your account.

Sincerely,

Winkflash

I am starting a small photography business and have printed a couple orders with winkflash and they arrived great. So I decided to place a larger quantitiy and that when things went sour. I placed an order of 98 wall placques, which took a long time to do, I received confirmation that they were in production. After some time, I called to track the order and Customer service said that they could only print 50 of the 98 and they didn't know when the next shipment would be in. I told them to print the first 50 of my order and they said they couldnt so that. I had to start over and only have 50 in my shopping cart for them to start the order! So here I went redoing the order. Then I got a call that they ran out of flat edges and would I like beveled. I said no and they told me that they didnt know when I would get my order. I asked to speak to mamgement and they said I had to email someone at Corporate. So I did and they wrote back saying they only receive 50 plaques month and that's all they will keep in inventory a month. I told them that I could give them orders of 200+ a month and they just said "sorry." Can you believe a company would not like to grow their business. Very frustrated because they know they have the market with these plaques. I cannot find another company that can pprint high quality photos on flat edge plaques. If anyone knows please let me know. Until then, I am a frustrated customer of Winkflash. Everytime an order comes to my house I hold my breath because if there is something wrong with it I have to deal with the terrible customer service of Winkflash

Small Company Almost Ruined by Winkflash

My experiences with Winflash until my last order has been good. I started to trust them as a viable quality, low cost printer. Everything was good until I trusted them with my company's reputation. I own a very small design company and was contracted to create customer posters for a local high school's sports banquet (one of the largest and well known high schools in the area). It was my opportunity to make a name for myself.

I made sure that I got my order in a week and a half before the banquet, plenty of time I thought. Well, it was plenty of time for half my order. Winkflash printed and shipped half my posters. How does that happen? Since I still had two days before the banquet, I called them and asked them to expedite the printing of the remaining posters and then overnight them to me. When the customer service rep was no help, I asked to talk to a manager. I was literally told that management does not take phone calls, only emails. I was also told that once I emailed management, I would be given a response within 24 hours. Since this was half the time I had left, I told them that was not acceptable. I needed to talk to them immediately and get this problem resolved.

I told them I was a loyal customer and that I thought this could be a chance for them to shine. Every company makes mistakes and if they corrected the error and got the posters to me the next day (overnight delivery) that I would proclaim them to the world for their great response to a problem. No such luck. Management did email me back but said they don't ship overnight.

I had to scramble to find a local printer that could fulfill my order and had to pay through the nose to do it. Needless to say, it was almost a total disaster for me and my small company.

I do not recommend you use this company due to their inadequate customer service

Experience with Winkflash NEW Winkflash!- in a word DON'T! It is NOTHING like the old winkflash! Their website is just not great, and that's when it works. It is is riddled with issues for large orders! (At least on IE and Chrome - you know the two most popular browser) They are either 1. Incompetent or 2. Too lazy to fix them. So their answer is Use Modzilla - Excuse me - you are a public internet company - you need to be able to work on at least the top 3 browsers. Let me Clear your cache without nottice AND Empty your cart and start over! GREAT! Thanks I love that I have to spend 2 hours picking, sizing, cropping again! For the third time.

Did that twice - only to find out their shipping rates are INSANE! Hey winkflash have you ever looked into priority flat rate shipping - it costs me more to have them ship me 4x6 prints than it would for someone to ship me REAMS of PAPER! Are you kidding me! 220 4x6 photos - $26.00 shipping! NOTE: All your competitors charge between 8-9 for the same amount of photos!

So I take everything but the 4X6's out of my cart - check out again - enter the FREE SHiiping code AND the shipping is still there - WHAT! I look again - nothing of the other sizes are gone! (and I am still getting errors with each and everyone picture take out And after 4 hours going back and forth trying to help them - sending screen prints - THIS is what they are willing to do to "compensate" me -
"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
On your next purchase, we will provide with a one time code for 50% off any product at any time. Whenever you wish to redeem this code, contact us again and we will gladly provide a code.
Thank you for your patience and we apologize for the inconvenience.
-The Winkflash Team"

" ARE YOU KIDDING ME!

Winkflash photo prints are pretty good. The printed books are okay but they have a visible halftone dot pattern.
The problem with Winkflash is mostly with photo transfer. They once had a great service for those of us with slow internet connections and limits on bandwidth: you could put your photos on a CD or DVD disk and mail them, and they would end up in your account! But some dummy over there took away that service, so now instead of buying prints every month, I now can only afford (from a bandwidth perspective) to upload a few photos at xmas time.
They also had an economical and high quality spiral bound winkbook in 4x6 or 3x5 sizes that were cheap enough to give away as presents. Just group some photos and they would get bound into a neat little book! But some dummy, maybe the same one that got rid of the photo transfer on disk, also got rid of that service. Shame on winkflash!
The website is pretty crappy in terms of user interface, especially if you want to transfer from a mac. No iPhoto plugin. If the FTP craps out in the middle of a transfer, it doesn't keep the files that were sent, you have to START OVER. This is really annoying if you have dial up or bandwidth quotas.
The quality of the photo prints is good. The price is okay. The shipping rates are so-so. But the crappy user interface, unreliability of transfer, and the defunct service of transfer via CD disk are all negatives. I use to be a big user, and would be again if they restored their sanity and re-instituted the core services, and brought back the winkbooks. I used sony image station before winkflash. The transfer part of that now defunct site was great compared to Winkflash. But the prices were not great and Sony would crop photos in some stupid ways without permission.