Shutterfly Announces “Shutterfly Gallery,” Featuring a New Social Network

I’m a big fan of on-demand book printing, and I’ve written about and tested the quality of a number of on-demand printing companies. In my tests, which you can find here in an article on PDNonline, I found the quality of Shutterfly’s books (hard and softcover) to be excellent. On Feb. 20, Shutterfly launched Shutterfly Gallery, a new community platform for sharing and connecting with others.

Below are the some of the highlights of the new Shutterfly Gallery. To begin with, members can now do the following on the site:

-Post their photo book creations, offering inspiration and tips to others;
-Add others’ books they like to a “favorites” list, or “email a friend;”
-Introduce themselves by personalizing an online profile with their favorite picture, unique username and a personal description; and
-Embed virtual photo books (like YouTube videos) into a personal webpage or blog. This makes the site useful as a kind of “flip book creation tool.”

One of the unique features that I found very interesting is the “Make One Like This,” that allows customers to “copy” posted photo books and use the designs as templates for their own personal creations. Customers can select a book they like and choose the “Make One Like This” feature, which will preserve the look and feel of the book design while removing the original photos and text. Customers can then add their own text and photos. This is a lot like using a template, but the advantage is that you will have many more designs from which to choose. I can see this service used by all levels of photographers and scrapbookers. When browsing through the site, I also noticed that Shutterfly offers the ability to share projects with friends and family, including full-screen slide shows of Shutterfly albums, calendars, scrapbook pages and collage posters (even if they are not members). You can find out more about those options on this page.

I looked through a number of the albums, and I’m really impressed. They remind me of some of the Scrapbooking magazines I’ve seen, with great detail taken to make the images and text look great together while telling a story of a trip, or a family event, like a child’s birthday. Their are a wide range of book options that can be used as wedding books, baby books, books for graduating seniors, or fine-art/commercial photography or art portfolios.

A suggestion I have when browsing albums is to click on “Options” above the albums and then drag the slider to the fastest setting. Otherwise, you will probably not be happy with the page turn speed. Also, even though it says to drag the page to see the next page (like turning a real page), that can be a bit tricky, so instead, I recommend just clicking on the right page of any album to go to the next page. I wish that I could turn off the page flip feature and just have the next page quickly appear. I’ll submit that as a feature request soon.

To learn more about the Shutterfly Gallery, visit http://community.shutterfly.com.