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 https://community.shutterfly.com.

Recent audio podcast tip on TypicalMacUser.com

I recently contributed an audio tip segment to the Typical Mac User Podcast. The tip covers printing in Apple OSX (Tiger and Leopard) and the main item I cover is how to save print presets in OSX. The whole show is very informative, but if you’d like to go right to my audio, you can click on the play button at the top, wait a little while for it to load, and then move the scroll bar to 23 minutes in.

Here’s a link to the podcast.

And here’s a link to a previous show in which I spoke about color management.

I think that the typicalmacuser.com website is a fantastic resource, filled with helpful information for Mac, iPod and iPhone users. Enjoy the shows!

How to make your handwriting into a font

I was just listening to TMUPLive (Typical Mac User Live) with the show’s host Victor Cajiao and his guest Chris Christensen. During the show, Victor and Chris discuss some very interesting history about Apple Computer in the 1990’s. After I read the show notes on TypicalMacUser.com, I checked out Chris Christensen’s personal blog, https://chris2x.com, and decided to read his earliest posts from February 2004.

I then came across Chris Christensen’s article about a piece of software called Fontifier. This software allows you to download a chart, which you fill out and scan. The software then creates a font from the characters. I think this is extremely cool, and I’m looking forward to trying it out. You can preview the font you create for free, and the cost to buy the font, if you want to keep it, is $9. You can see Chris’ article and his personal font here. And you can check out and try Fontifier here.

Chris Christensen has a fantastic podcast and blog called The Amateur Traveler. It features Chris’ stories, photos and video, and he also interviews people who talk about destinations all around the world. The audio is offered in mp3, as well as enhanced versions in AAC format, which includes images. A few months ago, I was a guest on the show and shared a number of travel photo tips. You can find the episode here.