Shutterfly.com Review

After deciding to give up my paid website in an effort to save money, I did tons of searching and finally settled on Windows Spaces as my website of choice.  But, if you read that review, you'll see I wasn't completely satisfied with it.  Then two things happened in the same week - my sister told me she was trying out this new site feature Shutterfly offered, and a few days later my neighbor sent us a link to their new site which - you guessed it - was on Shutterfly.

I tried out Shutterfly and decided in minutes that this was my new website of choice!  Shutterfly Sites are just so awesome that it's almost hard to believe.

Shutterfly Sites let you share photos...  You can share as many photos and albums as you want.  The space is unlimited, most likely because they are hoping people come to your site and order pictures.  Photos can be displayed in a variety of ways ranging from slideshows to filmstrips, to thumbnails.  It is so easy to organize my photos and albums on my site!  One thing I noticed right off the bat was that my photos actually look better on Shutterfly Sites than on any past site!  It is as if they do something to make them really crisp and clear.

Shutterfly Sites are easy to use....  In the past it always took me lots of time to get my site the way I wanted before I would share it.  With Shutterfly Sites, I was up and running in one evening!  It helped that I already have all my photos organized on CD.  I wasn't done adding all my content in one evening, but I had the site good enough to share in one evening.

Shutterfly Sites let you add pages...  It seems like you can add as many pages as you want.  I created a page for photos, a page for my blog, one for reviews, one for pics of just flowers, and one for just pics of the changing seasons.  It was so quick and easy to create each page because you can add sections here and there however you want.  There are many different types you can add such as a text section, calendar, blog, etc.  I should note I decided to keep my blog on Wordpress and just display it on the Shutterfly site instead of using the blog feature on Shutterfly which wasn't fancy enough for me.  However I do like how it displays a good amount of my Wordpress blog through the RSS feed so this site still works.

Shutterfly Sites offer security...We don't like to let the world see all our photos.  So what is neat about Shutterfly is there is a variety of security options.  If you choose, you can make your whole site protected by a password so that only people who have the password can see it.  That is a good option if you want a completely private site.  The option I choose is the members only option.  I could protect some pages or protect all the pages.  I decided to keep the site public except for a few pages that will only be for the members I give access to.  The final option is to make the entire site public.  It's totally up to you how you choose to use it!

Go try Shutterfly Sites today... and you might like the other products too!  I think I'll start purchasing my photos through Shutterfly.  After all, I got some free prints for signing up and more free prints for creating my first site.  I looked over the products and many of them seem similar to all other photo sites so it seems worth a try.  Snapfish prints are cheaper, but Shutterfly is very easy to use so it's worth the extra few cents per picture.  Even if you don't want to purchase from Shutterfly, it's worth signing up for just for the free website alone.  Enjoy!!

UPDATE on ORDERING: While I LOVE My site still, today I went through to order the 85 or so free pics I had in my account that were going to expire in a few days if I didn't order.  I found ordering to be a bit of a pain compared to Snapfish and other sites I've ordered from.  First off, you can't crop pics after you place them in your cart.  So if you put a pic in the cart, and then afterwards realize the heads are gonna be cut off, you have to remove it, crop it, then readd it.  Other sites let you crop after it's in the cart so this was a pain.  Second, if you start ordering, then decide to add more pics, it doesn't just add the pics to your current order.  It adds them as kind of a new order, and then you have to select the recipient and redo some of the other steps before it combines it all into one cart.  Pain!  Finally, I'm not sure if I missed it but after I ordered I don't see any page to show me all the pics I ordered.  I liked ot have a record of what I ordered and the thumbnails, but all they are showing me is the amount.  However 85 prints for 5$ due to all the freebies I got is a pretty good deal.

Update on Ordering - 9-27-09:  While Ordering is a bit of a hassle, I've learned to deal with it.  I do the pre-paid thing now so I get my photos at a good price, and it's all already paid for.  Everytime I want to order pics, I create an album called "9-27-09 Order" for example.  Then I copy/upload all the pics I want into that album.  It's fairly easy to copy pics on Shutterfly. Finally, I crop all my photos in that album to the way I want them printed.  Ordering is then a breeze!

Another cool feature they have now is that I can write on the back of each and every pic! I can just put one phrase on the back of a whole set, or I can decide what each pic says (see photo).  This is awesome because I can mark all my photos before I get them and easily organize them once I get them in the mail.  Also, there's no need to use markers which might leak or stain other photos.