Sam's Club Still Prints Photos, But They Arrive by Post

Sam’s Club is the interesting case among the closed photo counters, because the photo business did not actually close. It moved.

photo.samsclub.com is alive and selling prints, books, canvases and photo gifts. What it no longer does is hand you anything. Their own copy, checked on 2026-09-09, promises “Free Ground Shipping on all Orders” and photos “conveniently delivered right to your door.” The in-club Photo Centers closed in June 2020 and took passport photos with them; the word “passport” appears nowhere on the photo site today.

Why delivery decides this

For most photo printing, shipping is fine. You order a hundred holiday prints, they turn up, nobody minds waiting.

Passport photos do not usually work like that. People look for them because something has a date on it: an appointment on Thursday, a visa application already late, a renewal that has slipped further than intended. The question is almost never “where is cheapest”, it is “where can I have this in my hand today”.

That is what makes the surviving Sam’s Club route hard to use. You could lay six compliant 2x2 photos onto a 4x6 sheet, upload it, and have it printed properly. Then you wait for the post. And unlike a drugstore, there is no counter to fall back on if the timing turns out not to work.

If your deadline is genuinely weeks away, this is a perfectly reasonable way to buy prints, and the shipping is free. It is only the ordinary case, the urgent one, that it fails.

What to do instead when the date is close

The counters that still take passport photos on the spot are Walgreens at $16.99 for two prints with the digital file emailed, and Staples at $19.99. Walgreens also prints 4x6 photos at $0.39 with free same-day pickup at over 8,000 locations, which is the same trick as the Sam’s Club route without the wait.

If you are filing a first-time application rather than renewing by mail, the Post Office can accept the paperwork itself and treats the photo as a $15 add-on you are free to skip.

The one-day version

One Dollar Passport Photo costs $1. Upload a picture, the background is replaced and the frame is cropped to the 2x2 inch specification, and you see the finished result watermarked before paying. What you get is a six-up sheet plus the digital file, so the printing can happen at whichever counter is open near you rather than in a warehouse. The US passport photo page has the current specification.

The tradeoff is the usual one and worth stating rather than skipping: you take the photograph, and nobody checks it but the software and you. If that is the part you wanted a Sam’s Club employee for, the honest answer is that the employee has not been there since 2020, and the nearest replacement is a drugstore counter rather than a phone.