Far away from family? Send printed photos to their nearest drugstore or Target with Kicksend

Kicksend, the photo-sharing web and mobile app for families and friends, has just unveiled the latest version of its app. Just in time for holiday cards and end-of-year reminiscences, the startup is letting its users send their photos to stores to be printed — either a drugstore near you or a store near the ones you love.

“What we have done is essentially made it dead simple to take an album of photos, share it with your family and also made it possible to you and them both to print those photos in the easiest way possible,” said Kicksend founder Pradeep Elankumaran in an email to VentureBeat.

The app’s retail integration will start with CVS, Walgreens (already a Kicksend partner), and Target stores, and Elankumaran said more deals and other partners will be announced soon.

“For the retailers, it extends the investments they have made in their photo infrastructure,” he said. “For us, it is a business model that is not dependent on advertising.”

With the new print-to-family feature, Kicksend users pick the pics they want to send to their family or friends. The intended recipient will get a text message or an email — no crazy apps to download for Grandpa Hector! — and can order the prints they want in the sizes they want at the store they want.

The print-to-store/print-to-family feature is just one aspect of the new Kicksend app, which appears today in its third iteration. Other new touches include smart albums (photos are grouped based on date/time and location), the ability to share albums, and some privacy tweaks to make the product better for small groups to use.

And the mobile interfaces has gotten some love, too. “We massively overhauled all of Kicksend’s apps to make it have visual and UX design that’s on par with the best consumer apps on the iOS and Android platforms,” said Elankumaran. (The company’s corresponding web app got an overhaul back in May, as well.)

Here’s a sneak peek:

Kicksend was founded in 2011 and graduated from Y Combinator that year. The startup is based in Mountain View, California.

Top image courtesy of wavebreakmedia, Shutterstock