OUR TOP PICK!
Founded in 1999, Shutterfly is among largest online photo services, hosting over one billion images. They have been the Copernican Award winner for 2007 in the $100 million revenue category. The Copernican Awards recognizes top companies who put their customers at the centermost of their “business universe”.
Shutterfly photos are printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper for brighter colors and sharper whites. Shutterfly offers more and better options to customize each picture compared to other photo sites. Shutterfly membership allows you to customize albums, and add descriptions and dates to all your photos. They have recently added more editing tools to enhance your pictures; where you can select the saturation, tone, and exclusive effects that only Shutterfly allows you to do. When you’re ready to order prints, you’ll have even more features, including the option to add borders from 500 options, names and captions and anything else you want to be printed on the back of your pictures.
One of our favorite features is how you can customize your own book for children. Your child can star alongside the characters from Sesame Street, Alphabet Book, or any children ’s picture book! Their name will appear throughout the book, with their birthday, pictures, hometown, and a personalized dedication page. There is no need to hesitate if you’re not sure if the book will meet your expectations because Money Magazine awarded Shutterfly as the “Field Test Winner for Hardbound Photo Books”.
Shutterfly allows you to make your existing memories more memorable providing you with the resources to personalize everyday items like mugs, calendars and magnets. Once you sign up with Shutterfly, you get 15 free prints.
Special Features
- 15 Free Prints after signing up with Shutterfly
- Back of Print Messaging- Shutterfly lets you customize each photo by giving you the option of printing dates, names captions or a short message on the back of the photo, free of charge.
- Enhance your photos by adding borders choose from 500 free border, by themes, shapes, holidays and colors!
- Shutterfly Studio- Free photo software so you don’t need to always go online to organize and edit your photos. The software will appear on your desktop so you can access it anytime you want.
- New Editing Tools added to Shutterfly Studio!- New Features like oil paint that makes pictures look like oil paintings, thinning so subjects in pictures look thinner, whiten teeth to make teeth look whiter, straightening tools to straighten pictures due to a tilted camera are just a few examples!
- Shutterfly Collections- Create up to 2 web pages, where you can post your pictures along with captions, summaries, along with personalized colors and design so your friends and family can view your photos. Your friends and family can even add their own comments!
- Unlimited storage for all your pictures
- Shutterfly Pro Gallery- Sell your prints, at your own price with discounted printing
Services Offered
- Annual Savings Plans and Prepaid Prints start as low as 12¢
- 30 Day return policy for a full reprint or your money back
- Customer Support-Email/ Phone and FAQs page
Upload/ Managing Functions
You have 2 choices:
- Manually select each photo you want to be uploaded to your online photo album.
- Download Shutterfly’s free software. This browser tool makes it faster and easier to transfer your pictures to Shutterfly. Once you download the free software, uploading is much faster.
We highly recommend downloading the software. There really is a huge difference, plus you can edit your pictures offline too!
Pricing
4”x6” – 19¢ each
If you take lots of pictures, you may want to consider Shutterfly’s Prepaid Plan for $29.99 and you can get prints for 12¢, 14¢ or 15¢ each.
Film Mailer- $3.99 (includes processing & scanning, adding pictures to your account & returning negatives) + 19¢ each
Pro galleries from $99 for 250MB to $199 for 1GB
Shipping Costs
Standard shipping costs $1.99. Priority, 2-Day Next Day, Canada & International shipping is also available. For your convenience, they also tell you the estimated arrival date so you know when to expect your photos.
Turnaround Time
Prints are typically mailed within one day of order. Shutterfly was among the 2 sites where we’ve experienced the fastest shipping service, where we received our order in 2-3 days.
We were extremely impressed with Shutterfly’s packaging. Our pictures came in a lightweight attractive cardboard envelope, enclosed with a lightweight, see-thru envelope.
Quality
All of our prints had a sharp focus, with a soft blend of colors, all of which was printed on Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper.
Our Recommendation
Our favorite overall printing service is Shutterfly. With their easy to use interface, photo enhancing & editing tools, and their quality, Shutterfly is a clear winner.
If you’re like me, and not artistic, Shutterfly lets you get creative and you can personalize almost anything with your pictures. Their personalized products come out great, and were impressed how nice the quality was, which include photo books, magnets, coasters, aprons, wall frames and many more. To really see what you can do with your photos, visit the Shutterfly store!
We experienced first hand of the quality of their photos, and they exceeded our expectations. First, we were amazed with their fast shipping service. They also include a printed full color index print to look at all your prints at once. The back of print messaging came very useful; especially when you forget the place and date you took that picture. We encourage you to use this service, it’s free!
Shutterfly has the best software where you have the power of editing your photos. If customization is what you’re really going for, signup for Shutterfly and get 25 free prints!
Get 25 FREE prints from Shutterfly as a new customer!
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