Shutterfly

I've ordered photo prints and designed custom wall calendars with Shutterfly before, but two or three years had passed since I last used the service. When I logged in again recently, I was reminded of all the features I found so satisfying then?and now. Shutterfly delivers high-quality finished products, although you'll pay a dollar or two more for it than you might on other sites, like Snapfish and Zazzle. But Shutterfly is the best make-your-own service you'll find for photo products, and thus, our Editors' Choice.

The only service I've encountered that matches Shutterfly's excellence and ease-of-use is Mixbook, but Shutterfly's final products are ever so slightly higher in quality.

Sizes, Styles, and Price
To test Shutterfly, I designed a custom photo wall calendar, a typical?dare I say requisite?annual gift among my family members. Shutterfly's options are a 12-month calendar ($21.99) and an 18-month calendar ($26.99), both of which measure 11 by 8 inches. If those dimensions strike you as too small, you might find Mixbook's 14 by 11-inch ($34.99) or 12 by 12 square ($29.99) calendars more to your liking. On CafePress, the only option is 11 by 8.5 inches, although it's available as either a 12-month ($19.99) or 18-month ($24.99) calendars.

Price-wise, Shutterfly defines the high end of the range for 11 by 8 calendars, although it's only a few dollars more than the lowest priced option I've seen over on Zazzle ($17.95).

Because CafePress and Zazzle both target the small business market, you can nab a better deal when you buy in bulk with those services. And both those services have a huge catalog of customizable products, and are more known for things like t-shirts and baseball caps. If you just need one or two paper items, though, stick with Shutterfly or Mixbook. Mixbook only has photobooks, calendars, and cards, while Shutterfly does offer quite a few more items, like mugs, blankets, mouse pads, and canvas prints. Shutterfly's templates have as much style and variety as Mixbook's, and both services let you further customize the templates, page-by-page.

Online Design Tools
When I started my 2013 calendar project, I logged into Shutterfly and found all the images I had used previously still stored in the system. Shutterfly lets you organize images, too, into folders and projects.

I started my project by choosing a template from the several dozen that Shutterfly provides. The selection varies from cutesy to chic, and I had a hard time choosing among three templates that had the smart and sharp look I wanted. One slightly confusing thing about the templates is you won't see a full bleed (that is, photo that takes up the entire page) option, but it does exist. Within any template, you can always choose how many photos to place on each page, and the single image option has a sub-option to place the image across the entire page. Second to that is a "classic white" template, which puts your images on a plain white background.

Shutterfly gives you insight at every step about how your finished project will look. Preview a template for a calendar, and you'll see a thumbnail for all 12 or 18 months' pages on the far right side of the screen. When you're nearly finished with a project, Shutterfly forces you to preview it one final time to check for typos or other problems, and it even flags your attention if it finds an image that might not print correctly or text that doesn't fit into its box.

The editor itself is straightforward. As mentioned, you can choose how many images to place on a page, and also select how they'll be displayed: centered, tiled, tilted, staggered, etc. Some of these sub-templates leave room for text in case you want to add a caption or quote.

You can choose on which month to start a calendar, tick off which holidays you'd like to see displayed, pen in family birthdays and events, and even add a custom image to a day?like grandma and grandpa's photo for their anniversary.

Shutterfly, like Mixbook, handles image uploading with aplomb. Both sites offer bulk uploading that worked well when I used them.

If you don't have photos you want to use on hand, Mixbook can pull them from Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Picasa, and SmugMug, but Shutterfly only connects to Facebook and Picasa. It does, however, have some integration with other software, including Adobe Photoshop and Apple iPhoto, that speeds up photo importing, too.

Once you choose the images you want for your project, they appear in a bin at the bottom of the design workspace. A checkmark icon appears on each one after you place it in your project, helping you keep track of which images have or have not been used.

My personal favorite feature in Shutterfly is the preview. Because I have a professional background working in print media, I know all too well how easy it is to overlook an error before sending a page to press. Text and images get cut off, typos appear seemingly out of nowhere?it happens. Shutterfly, however, lets you know when it might happen by flagging for your attention any possible errors it finds in a mandatory preview step. Ultimately, it's up to you to correct the problems, but it's always helpful to have a second source of quality control.

Excellent Quality, Slightly Higher Prices
You can rely on Shutterfly for excellent quality photo products, from wall calendars to custom greeting cards and stationary, although the prices may be a dollar or two more than you'll see on other services. Shutterfly is easily our Editors' Choice for making customized photo products. For any items you can't find on Shutterfly, try CafePress or Zazzle, which boast much bigger catalogs of goods.

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