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The familiar Shutterfly photo printing service offers probably the most extensive range of products you can grace with your photography, and its image quality for standard prints is perfectly acceptable. The company is now owned by Snapfish, but it remains a distinct service. Shutterfly is not the least expensive of the services we tested, but for your money you do get better packaging than some lower-cost photo printing services provide, and the site has good photo-sharing options.
How Much Do Shutterfly Prints Cost?
For a 4-by-6-inch print, you pay 18 cents at Shutterfly, which puts the service in the middle of the pack for this size. Note that as with most similar services, Shutterfly often has lower promotional prices, especially during shopping holidays. Snapfish charges just 9 cents for the same size, while Nations Photo Lab charges 32 cents. Walgreens Photo and CVS Photo charge 37 and 39 cents for 4-by-6s, respectively, though in those cases, you pay for the extra convenience of same-day local pickup.
(Credit: Shutterfly)
Shutterfly prices for larger print sizes are also in the midrange. For a Shutterfly 5-by-7, you pay 99 cents, and an 8-by-10 costs $3.95. RitzPix charges $3.25 for a 5-by-7 and $5.29 for an 8-by-10 enlargement. Mpix prices 5-by-7s at $1.69 and 8-by-10s at $3.29. Walmart Photo is the cheapest option for these sizes, at 68 cents for 5-by-7s and $1.94 for 8-by-10s. Amazon Prints is slightly above that, at 69 cents for a 5-by-7 and $2.09 for an 8-by-10.
Gifts and Cards
Shutterfly lets you print your photos on a multitude of surfaces: cards, stationery, calendars, personalized gifts, home décor, and more. Beyond the expected mugs, magnets, and posters, you can choose flowerpots, blankets, phone cases, pillows, shower curtains, and even pet food bowls. Newest in the collection are doormats, outdoor pillows, and picnic blankets.
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(Credit: Shutterfly)
You can get holiday photo cards and cards for many other occasions—graduation, wedding, birthday, and more—from Shutterfly, starting at a mere $2.43 for flat cards and $3.33 for folded cards. The per-card price drops as your order size increases, as you’d expect. Shutterfly offers among the most options for greeting cards of any service we’ve reviewed, including foil printing and decorative shapes. You can even have your recipients’ addresses printed on the included envelopes.
One thing I did not see among Shutterfly’s offerings was a necktie, but you can get socks, face masks, and hoodies. If you need an unusual object to print your pictures on, Shutterfly should be the first place you look.
(Credit: PCMag/Shutterfly)
How Good Are Shutterfly’s Photo Books?
Photo books, in particular, are a strength. The professional custom-designed Make My Book option starts at $29.98 for an 8-by-8, but for just $9.99, you can get a 6-by-6-inch hardcover. Snapfish’s starting price of $19.99 gets you an 8-by-8-inch softcover book. Snapfish doesn’t offer a design service as Shutterfly does, but I expect most people who get to the point of uploading their photos will want to choose the pictures themselves for their photo book. Shutterfly offers two routes: you can place the photos manually or have them autofill after upload. You need to submit at least 50 photos to use Shutterfly’s Make My Book service.
Uploading and Organizing Images With Shutterfly
Shutterfly has improved its uploading and ordering interface since PCMag’s last review. You can upload photos directly from your PC or import them from Facebook, Google Photos, or Instagram for printing. The initial upload tool now supports dragging and dropping photo files onto its window, and it no longer requires the Adobe Flash plug-in. Once you’re in one of your galleries, you can click Get More Photos. Shutterfly allows more image file formats than most services: JPG, HEIC, BMP, and PNG. Nations Photo Lab adds the more pro-level TIFF format as an option.
(Credit: PCMag/Shutterfly)
After uploading photos to your online gallery, you discover that Shutterfly’s editing options are more limited than those you find on sister site Snapfish. With Shutterfly, you can only crop, rotate, or add a border to it. You don’t get any lighting adjustments as you do with Printique and Mpix. You do get an option to automatically enhance your photos, which is on by default. Turn it off if you painstakingly adjusted your images in photo editing software like Lightroom.
Shutterfly makes adding and changing print sizes easy, showing all photos and size choices on a single page. You can even select multiple sizes for all the photos in your order in one place at the top.
(Credit: PCMag/Shutterfly)
One nice touch is that you can enter text to print on the back of your photo—very handy for remembering distant relatives or travel locations. I didn’t see this option in most other services, though it’s available in Printique. Shutterfly offers some interesting photo size choices, including 5-by-15, 8-by-24, and 12-by-36 for panoramic shots. Nations also offers those sizes, though Walgreens Photo does not.
You can pay for your photos with PayPal or AfterPay as well as a credit or debit card, which is more flexible than Nations’ credit-card-only method. For my order of 25 prints, shipping started at $7.96 for Economy 7-to-12-day delivery. For $12.96 Standard shipping, I could have pared that time down to a max of 10 days. Expedited delivery would have cost $26.62 for the order, and Rush, which would only have reduced the shipment to a guaranteed 7 days, would have been $39.06. By comparison, the cheapest price for shipping the same order from Snapfish was just $4.98.
After completing my order, Shutterfly displayed the expected shipping date window for my order, as Snapfish did. Shutterfly lets you pick up your photos at Walgreens Photo, Target, or CVS, but I chose to have my order printed at the company’s labs and mailed. The local pickup options would test a store’s printers rather than Shutterfly’s. Still, it’s a handy option, especially when time is tight.
Shutterfly also offers a decent mobile app, which lets you upload photos from your device for printing. The app lets you see any photos you’ve uploaded from a computer, too. From the app, you can order not only prints, but also mugs, iPhone cases, canvas prints, cushions, and other items. The mobile app lets you share online galleries, as Snapfish does, but there are still no in-app photo correction tools.
How Good Are Shutterfly’s Prints?
My photos arrived in better packaging than some other budget services I tested. The 4-by-6s came in their own separate sleeve, with an overnight-style outer envelope protecting everything. It’s better than RitzPix’s and Target Photo’s thin paper envelope but matches Snapfish’s and Walmart Photo’s 8-by-10s loose in a cardboard overnight envelope.
Shutterfly uses its own branded photo paper; it used to use Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which is of good quality, though on the thin side. No matter, the paper yields a sharp image with good color accuracy. Higher-end services like Nations Photo Lab use the more professional and long-lasting Kodak Endura paper. One thing I really like about Shutterfly’s photos is that the filenames are printed on the back, even though I didn’t specify a title to print there. I also appreciate the contact sheet that came with each size group of prints.
In this test iteration, Shutterfly far surpassed what I saw the last time I reviewed the service. The photos have good detail and accurate colors. In fact, they were remarkably similar to photos from Target and Snapfish, leading me to think that perhaps they all use the same processor.
In the cityscape image below, you can see the Shutterfly print’s sharpness, which is noticeably superior to that of the Amazon Photos print. Color accuracy was notably better than that of CVS Photos (which, because of its super sharpness, is our one-hour pickup Editors’ Choice winner) and even slightly better than the high-end Mpix service.
(Credit: PCMag)
In the portrait crop below, you can also see detail and color accuracy. The best color accuracy is in the Nations Photo Lab print, an Editors’ Choice winner, which also lacks the faint streakiness seen in the budget services. You also don’t have to put up with the blown highlights (lost bright-area detail) in the Walgreens and Walmart prints.
(Credit: PCMag)
Online Galleries
Shutterfly has strong online gallery sharing for photos you’ve uploaded to the service. You can even create your Share site to which you can post events, such as birthday parties and sports events. You can specify that viewing your gallery requires a sign-in, or you can make it publicly visible. Shutterfly gives you a variety of site designs, including seasonal options, and the resulting site can play full-window slideshows of your images. Anyone who views your photos can order prints of them from Shutterfly too.
Snap That Shutter!
Shutterfly’s print image quality is perfectly acceptable, its pricing is average to high, and its website experience is good. Some good points about the service include excellent packaging, shareable online galleries, and the filename or photo title printed on the backs of the photos. Furthermore, if you’re looking to print your pictures on the widest possible variety of media, Shutterfly is tops. For the best image quality, however, look to our Editors’ Choice photo printing services: Nations Photo Lab at the premium level, Snapfish for a budget option, and CVS Photo for one-hour printing with local pickup.
3.5
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Shutterfly offers a huge selection of media on which you can print your photos along with standard prints, but its prices are higher than you pay for the same quality from bargain competitors, especially for larger prints.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/shutterfly