Online Photo Storage Questions

Updated on July 26, 2011
J.A. asks from Fresno, CA
8 answers

I am interested in using Shutterfly, Snapfish, etc. so that I can create digital scrapbooks, prints, and an archive DVD of my pictures. I have been using Kodak Gallery, but it seems to take so long to upload my pictures from my camera, plus I don't like their photo album options too much.

Ideally I would like to upload all of my pictures to one of these sites. However I currently have >500 pictures on my digital camera, and it seems like this would take days to upload. Do you use a site that uploads your pictures quickly? Do you upload ALL of your pictures or just your favorites? Any tips re: how to do this faster? Thank you!!!

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So What Happened?

Thanks, everyone! It looks like Shutterfly is the clear winner. I tried it out last night - it is much faster, although I couldn't get it to upload straight from my camera, so had to save to hard drive and then to Shutterfly. Anyways, looks like it'll be great. thank you!

More Answers

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M.L.

answers from Houston on

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.

2 moms found this helpful
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D.K.

answers from State College on

Shutterfly! You can have as much storage as you and it doesn't matter how big your pictures are. Very easy to use and they recently added even more options to photobooks so you can do anything you want now. Quality and customer service are great and you can find coupons. Upload speed is going to depend on your computer and internet also. I can upload about 500 large MB pictures in one to two hours, but it would take my mom about 12 hours with both of us using Shutterfly.

I upload unedited pictures in large quantities to get them on our share site for family to see. Once I edit i do another album with the edited ones. Not everything ever goes up since we take a ton of pictures. We do have everything on two external hard drives though.

1 mom found this helpful
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M.R.

answers from New York on

My favorite site is Shutterfly. They allow you to upload pictures easily and quickly. I am always pleased with the quality of their prints also. I upload them all but can easily pick and choose which ones I want to print. You can also find many coupon codes from time to time which can give you free prints and photo books (only pay shipping).

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D.W.

answers from San Francisco on

I use Snapfish. I currently have photos dated back to 2002 - and there are 10s of thousands I have stored. Snapfish has the least expensive photos and they always send me 50% of coupons (which can also be found on google). My sons are on baseball teams and I take hundreds (if not thousands) of photos during the season and make photo books for the coaches as a thank you gift. The 50% off coupons are great. There is no charge, but I do make several purchases throughout the year. I belive all of the sites are slow on the uploads.

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R.P.

answers from Seattle on

I use shutterfly and love it. I uploaded about 700 prints in like 2.5 hours.
Shutterfly also has this great scrapbook options you upload whatever pictures you want in the album and you can just say place in book and it does it! You can download different page backgrounds and stickers and such. Great price and they have great discounts all the time. I have a book ready for print and i'm just waiting for a 50% off in my email then I will print it.
Hope you enjoy whatever you decided on!

K.L.

answers from Cleveland on

Ha! I have you beat! I currently have 2162 pictures on my camera. So yeah, I REALLY need to get these ones stored!
I love Shutterfly. I also use Walgreens.com to store a lot of pics, because that's who I use to print them all. It doesn't take all that long to upload, but I usually make folders (Christmas 2010 - and then upload those, then go onto the next one, etc.) It's easy.
Now to make myself do it...

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V.B.

answers from San Francisco on

Several people I know use Shutterfly, I have yet to give it a try. I am told once in a while you are required to purchase photos in order to keep the pictures in the free storage.

I used Photobucket for years without having to purchase any pictures. Eventually, my account said I exceeded the limit! However, my daughter has thousands of pictures in her account and still has not exceeded her limit or had pictures printed!?

I just recently purchased an external hard drive since I lost several precious family photos from a virus that wiped out my computer and I had not done a back-up in a very long time.

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E.Q.

answers from San Francisco on

I use both Shutterfly and Snapfish. I'm starting to lean more towards Shutterfly. They store your photos for free while Snapfish requires a once a year purchase. Shutterfly also sends me coupon codes for free prints. Just this year I've received over 200 free prints. I've also received coupon codes for free 8x8 photo books, you just pay for shipping! Also with Shutterfly your pictures are in chronological order with the picture name & dates printed on the back. Snapfish seems to ship in random order.

As with others suggestions, I upload and leave my computer on while doing something else!

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