Shutterfly Prints Overall Rating:

Shutterfly Quick Review:

Shutterfly is a well known printing and sharing site. The print service is easy to use. Their site is well designed and well laid-out. They provide an excellent selection of print borders and photo gifts. Shutterfly offers 25 free prints. You’ll be happy with Shutterfly!

Sign up for Free at Shutterfly:  New Member’s Offer - Get 25 FREE 4×6 Prints when you join Shutterfly! Limited Time Offer.

Shutterfly Full Review: 

Signing up with Shutterfly is easy. Uploading to Shutterfly is easy as well. Just select a new album, click on Upload, select your photos and away you go. The upload process is fairly quick. I uploaded some large photos which took some time. If you know what print size you want, you’ll want to size your photos prior to uploading. Shutterfly didn’t require any software downloads which is nice.

Shutterfly recommends a print resolution of 160 to 190 pixels per inch. If you want a 4” X 6” print, you should size it to 1024 X 768 pixels. This will give you the best print quality from Shutterfly.

Once you’ve uploaded your files you can view them as a group or select a photo, click on the down arrow and select View Larger to view the selected image. The other photos in your album appear at the bottom of the screen. They can be selected by clicking on them.

Shutterfly has a nice layout that is easy to use and understand. Across the top is the global navigation. The global navigation includes My Shutterfly, My Pictures, Share, Community and Store. These tabs take you to your main page, your picture folders & albums, the photo sharing page, publicly shared photo books and the Shutterfly store.

The My Pictures tab is where you can view your photos and albums. On this page there are three tabs. The Organize tab allows you to edit photo information, re-order the sequence of your photos, move photos to another album or copy photos to another album. The Enhance tab allows you to edit, adjust and apply effects to your photos. The last tab is Play Slideshow that displays your photos in a slideshow.

The Enhance screen has four options – Fix, Crop, Effects, and Borders. The Fix tab is for correcting red-eye. The red-eye removal is a three step process. Click on the red eye, click on the red eye in the preview and then either save or cancel the adjustment. The Crop tab allows you to size your photo for printing. You can drag the resize box by the corners to resize. Or you can select a preset for 4X6, 5X7 or 8X10. You can also rotate the photo left, right or upside down. There’s also a Custom Crop option. The custom crop option allows you to drag each side of the crop box independently from the other. Print preview allows you to view the photo after cropping. No matter what size I selected, the preview showed white borders around the image even though Shutterfly indicated the photo could be printed up to 20X30.

The Effects tab provides very basic effects including black & white, color tone adjustment, color saturation and a soft focus effect. I found these tools to be less than useful. The Borders tab was quite surprising. Shutterfly provides an extensive number of borders you can apply to your photos. They range from the simple black border, to babies, holidays, calendars and sports borders. It’s a very impressive collection of borders. Very nice!

Shutterfly allows you to share your albums by e-mail or by creating what Shutterfly calls a share page. Sending an e-mail provides the receiver with a link to your album. They can view the images as a group or in a slide show. They can also purchase copies of your photos. Creating a web page is easy with Shutterfly. They have a nice selection of ready to use page layouts. The ready to use layouts include family, photo journal, baby, travel, clubs & groups, wedding, kid’s sports and classroom layouts. Be sure to click on See All Styles at the bottom of the screen.

Just select your style, name your site and you’re off and running. The page created by Shutterfly is very nice. It looks like a professionally created web page. It’s easy to modify and update. It’s a very nice feature. If you’d like to know more about the sharing aspect of Shutterfly, read the Shutterfly review on photo sharing.

Shutterfly has a great store for purchasing posters or other photo gifts. The gifts include photo books, greeting cards for all occasions, calendars, stickers, notepads, mugs, canvas, mouse pads, tags, purses, jewelry, t-shirts and personalize books for your kids. It’s a great selection of gifts for your photos.

Shutterfly provides the option to pick up photos in some Target stores. Note that the price is higher for store pick-up. Also, you can’t pick up free photos at a store.

Shutterfly offers standard shipping, 2-day shipping and overnight shipping. The cost to ship my photos was $2.11. Not bad. I received my photos within a few days.

The online help files are pretty good although the search function takes a little to understand.

Overall, Shutterfly provides a great photo printing service. Signing up was easy. Uploading was easy and fairly quick. Shutterfly could use some improvement on their editing tools. Ordering prints was easy also. Shutterfly has a very nice web page creator for sharing your photos. Fly free with Shutterfly!

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Click on the image below to view a larger image.

Shutterfly main screen:

Shutterfly upload screen:

Shutterfly slide show screen:

Shutterfly web page: