Snapfish was launched in 1999 by business partners Rajil Kapoor, Bala Parthasarathy, Suneet Wadhwa, and Shripati Acharya. Ben Nelson joined soon thereafter as corporate development operations lead, to become CFO and later president. Jasbir Patel is now the president and CEO of snapfish. On October 30, 2001 Snapfish was acquired by District Photo for an undisclosed amount. In 2005, Snapfish was bought by Hewlett-Packard. While HP did not disclose the acquisition sum, a Merrill Lynch report estimated that HP may have paid between $300 million and $400 million for Snapfish, while Snapfish’s revenue was less than $100 million. Snapfish co-founder Raj Kapoor confirmed in a 2011 interview that the acquisition price was $300 million. In 2004, Snapfish opened a physical retail concept store in Alexandria, Virginia, but later closed it. In August 2013, Snapfish announced on their local websites that they were shutting down the service in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and Spain. In April 2015, HP reached an agreement to sell Snapfish back to District Photo. Under the terms of the sale, HP allowed the company to continue to use its printing services. During a website conversion in 2016 Snapfish had a data loss while converting to their new web system. Photos prior to January 2014 were unable to be migrated to the new website system. Snapfish said that although some photo albums were recovered, others will remain empty. Typically Snapfish has three versions of images: high resolution, low resolution, and printable images. Both the high resolution and low resolution were lost and the backup files for the printable images were not recoverable. On September 28, 2018 it was announced that Snapfish would acquire CafePress for more than $25 Million. The acquisition of CafePress was completed on November 9, 2018. On June 10, 2019, Apollo Global Management announced that it would acquire both Snapfish and its rival Shutterfly in separate deals valued at around $3 billion in total. The two companies will be merged into a single entity, with Snapfish parent company District Photo as a minority stakeholder. The merger of Shutterfly and Snapfish was completed on January 8, 2020. On May 4, 2020 it was announced that Snapfish will no longer be providing the platform for Boots Photo in the UK and Ireland from May 13, 2020. The German photo and online printing company Cewe won the contract from Snapfish at the end of 2019.
