Photo Service

As a photographer, I can't tell you how important pictures are to me. I wanted to take a minute to talk about the photo service I use for my prints and online photo storage. I started looking for a way to store my photos online a few years ago when I took a break from facebook for a few months. I wanted a way to still be able to share pictures with friends even when I wasn't using facebook so I researched a few different options. I looked in to picasa, shutterfly and kodak gallery but ultimately ended up going with shutterfly. At the time when I was looking at all this, picasa had limits on how much you could upload and didn't have an easy way to order prints. Kodak gallery requires that you buy a certain amount of merchandise from them each year or they delete your pictures (yikes!). I ended up going with shutterfly for several reasons.

1. they have unlimited online storage and they never delete your pictures. This means they are a great way to back up your photos.

2. They have a photo sharing site template that you can use to easily share pictures. It's not the most professional looking but it's good enough for sharing with friends and family, others can also order prints from your share site so that's a nice feature as well.

3. Ordering prints and photo books is easy, if not exactly cheap. I'll be honest that ordering prints and photo gifts from shutterfly can get pretty pricey. But the quality has always been good and they actually have really good promotions if you are a member. You just have to wait until you get emailed a coupon for 40% or for free prints or cards. They actually have some very good deals if you are patient enough to wait for them.

Here are some examples of products I've gotten from shutterfly.

Photo books from our wedding and honeymoon.

These provide templates but are easy to customize with different layouts and backgrounds. 

For the honeymoon book I used a travel theme for the backgrounds. 

I recently took advantage of a promotion where I got 101 free prints! I was in heaven! I bought this photo collage frame at Kohls (I used my Kohls cash and got it for $6!) to display some of my new prints.  

I also use shutterfly to print my Christmas cards with my own custom designs and I have been very happy with them! The only downside is that they print their logo on everything but it doesn't bother me too much for personal things. In case you're interested here is a link to my share site through thema s well http://audreyalbright.shutterfly.com/.

Does anyone else have an online photo service they love? I am always open to new suggestions but shutterfly has been my favorite so far :-)