M.L.
Shutterfly is the best. I've used the others you mentioned and even tried out a couple of others but Shutterfly is my favorite and we've ordered at least 10 photo books from them over the years along with mugs, cards, invites, etc.
With Shutterfly you can download their program to your desktop that allows you to select whichever photos you want to upload and then you can just walk away and it takes care of it for you. We take hundreds of photos every week and when I have a large album to upload, I set it to start upload at night and then leave my computer on or even during the day while I'm busy with something else. I upload every single picture I take so it'll be saved on their online site in case I ever lose things on my computer. I do have them backed up on an external harddrive as well but like having several retreival options. Our account has more than 10K photos in it right now so you know it can hold alot. Our vacation last month alone had more than 1,000 photos at high resolution so that was a lot of storage space.
With Shutterfly we also have a free Shutterfly share site where I have an entire site that I can make private or public and post photos that my invited friends and family can log on to whenever they want and see the new things I've posted. I have a tab for each year and I have pictures and photo albums that I share on the site for viewing. I select only the best pictures out of each album that I want to share since my account actually has every single photo taken. I organize my folders by date the photo was taken so when I create albums, I don't have to wonder about which day the photo was taken. You can also upload up to 10 videos on the free site. I have our annual vacation photo albums that I had printed available for viewing on the share site along with current videos of the kids that the family can watch. My mom logs in weekly to see the latest photos and rewatch the videos.
Shutterfly offers the best selection of photo albums that I've found. They have options where you can select the photos you want and Shutterfly will create an album for you. You can then edit that album instead of starting from scratch. I personally prefer to do mine from scratch but it is time consuming because our albums contain the maximum 100 pages and several hundred photos. They just added a new album that is more like a scrapbook that allows you to move customize the entire album by moving the pictures around on the page, expanding the size of certain images, adding stickers, different layouts, choosing various backgrounds, putting borders around each image, etc.