Shutterfly ending the share sites

Questions on how we spend our money and our time - consumer goods and services, home and vehicle, leisure and recreational activities
Post Reply
Topic Author
Wabbit
Posts: 205
Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2009 3:12 pm

Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by Wabbit »

Shutterfly is ending their "share sites" where a community group can collaborate with posting photo albums, videos, and signup sheets. My kid's school relied on it extensively - does anyone have suggestions for a replacement? (The main Shutterfly photo-printing service is remaining, it is the share sites that are closing.)

Desirable features would include:

- Terms of service where you retain ownership of the material you upload (to increase privacy for kids in photos)
- Unlimited photo storage, able to download full-resolution photos (maybe download complete albums)
- Free (although it seems the era of free online storage is ending)
- Phone app for uploading/browsing photos, viewing other features
- Membership in multiple groups, and possibly several levels (for us, being a member of a classroom, and also an all-school group)
- Email / text messaging to groups
- Other useful things like online sign-up sheets, volunteer lists, calendar

Google Photos has many of those features but the terms of service give ownership of photos to Google, and the storage is not unlimited. And mainstream social media sites are probably not suitable for similar reasons.

Thanks!
Topic Author
Wabbit
Posts: 205
Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2009 3:12 pm

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by Wabbit »

(yes, a bump to get back on the landing page) please let me know if anyone has suggestions!
TN_Boy
Posts: 4134
Joined: Sat Jan 17, 2009 11:51 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by TN_Boy »

Wabbit wrote: Mon Jan 30, 2023 11:14 am Shutterfly is ending their "share sites" where a community group can collaborate with posting photo albums, videos, and signup sheets. My kid's school relied on it extensively - does anyone have suggestions for a replacement? (The main Shutterfly photo-printing service is remaining, it is the share sites that are closing.)

Desirable features would include:

- Terms of service where you retain ownership of the material you upload (to increase privacy for kids in photos)
- Unlimited photo storage, able to download full-resolution photos (maybe download complete albums)
- Free (although it seems the era of free online storage is ending)
- Phone app for uploading/browsing photos, viewing other features
- Membership in multiple groups, and possibly several levels (for us, being a member of a classroom, and also an all-school group)
- Email / text messaging to groups
- Other useful things like online sign-up sheets, volunteer lists, calendar

Google Photos has many of those features but the terms of service give ownership of photos to Google, and the storage is not unlimited. And mainstream social media sites are probably not suitable for similar reasons.

Thanks!
I think the group should at least reconsider the "free" requirement and replace it with "low cost."

At a quick glance, things like smugmug and flickr (I think the former owns the latter) can give you good, ad-free accounts for less than $10 a month. I didn't look through all the membership features to ensure they would fit all the needs you cite, but they satisfy a lot of the requirements.

No matter what, a strategy to move again if necessary should be considered.
dukeblue219
Posts: 4074
Joined: Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:40 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by dukeblue219 »

Smugmug is what our kids preschool uses
dukeblue219
Posts: 4074
Joined: Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:40 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by dukeblue219 »

Wabbit wrote: Mon Jan 30, 2023 11:14 am Google Photos has many of those features but the terms of service give ownership of photos to Google, and the storage is not unlimited.
Citation needed. This is no more true of Google than any other service with complex boilerplate TOS.
TN_Boy
Posts: 4134
Joined: Sat Jan 17, 2009 11:51 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by TN_Boy »

dukeblue219 wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 9:52 am
Wabbit wrote: Mon Jan 30, 2023 11:14 am Google Photos has many of those features but the terms of service give ownership of photos to Google, and the storage is not unlimited.
Citation needed. This is no more true of Google than any other service with complex boilerplate TOS.
I think you are right, Google does not have ownership of the photos, but Google is out of the running because the free plan does not have unlimited storage anyway.

Which is one reason I think the OP's community group needs to bite the bullet and spend $100 a year or so and pay for a photo service. It will be hard to get good quality stuff that is free. I mean, I like free stuff too, but ....
Topic Author
Wabbit
Posts: 205
Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2009 3:12 pm

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by Wabbit »

Yes, I stand corrected: It looks like Google does not own your photos, and their terms of service are similar to other companies providing similar services. Thanks for the correction!

https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en
Your content remains yours, which means that you retain any intellectual property rights that you have in your content. For example, you have intellectual property rights in the creative content you make, such as reviews you write. Or you may have the right to share someone else’s creative content if they’ve given you their permission.
Topic Author
Wabbit
Posts: 205
Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2009 3:12 pm

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by Wabbit »

TN_Boy wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 9:50 am I think the group should at least reconsider the "free" requirement and replace it with "low cost."

At a quick glance, things like smugmug and flickr (I think the former owns the latter) can give you good, ad-free accounts for less than $10 a month. I didn't look through all the membership features to ensure they would fit all the needs you cite, but they satisfy a lot of the requirements.

No matter what, a strategy to move again if necessary should be considered.
Yes, the era of free unlimited online storage looks to be over. I did say the list was "desirable" features. I (or others) will look at smugmug and flickr, thanks! Others reading please feel free to post more suggestions too! :)
Ron Ronnerson
Posts: 3563
Joined: Sat Oct 26, 2013 6:53 pm
Location: Bay Area

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by Ron Ronnerson »

I’m an elementary school teacher and have been using Shutterfly’s share sites as a classroom website for the past few years. I am disappointed to see it coming to an end as it’s been very handy to post text, links, upload documents, and have a place that makes it easy for parents to access the pictures I take of their kids participating in school activities. The Shutterfly site was also a good place to share YouTube videos that I made during the time that I was teaching remotely.

Prior to Shutterfly, I used TeacherWeb for about a decade but then they stopped their offering as well. Unfortunately, it seems like one must be prepared to move.

I do use Sign Up Genius for online sign-up sheets. It has come in handy for things like making appointments for parent-teacher conferences. There is a free version available but it contains ads.

Anyway, I appreciate you starting the thread as I'm looking to explore other options too. In the meantime, I’ve transferred most of the content I had up on Shutterfly over to my Google Classroom page (which is often available to staff at schools). This is just for time being as I am in search of a better alternative for next school year.
teCh0010
Posts: 415
Joined: Mon Oct 31, 2011 11:20 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by teCh0010 »

Check out the Band app.

Photos, Calendars, Messages, Chats.

My sons school trap team was on Shutterfly, moved to the Band app. The high school band is also on there, and the Boy Scout troop is looking at moving.
rich126
Posts: 4475
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2018 3:56 pm

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by rich126 »

dukeblue219 wrote: Sat Feb 04, 2023 9:51 am Smugmug is what our kids preschool uses
I've had an account with Smugmug for a while now after coming to the conclusion that most free things on the web eventually disappear. Now that I'm married I'm hoping my wife will move her tons of photos off her phone/ipad/icloud and store a copy on Smugmug to preserve the important ones.
----------------------------- | If you think something is important and it doesn't involve the health of someone, think again. Life goes too fast, enjoy it and be nice.
chet96
Posts: 218
Joined: Fri Feb 21, 2020 8:14 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by chet96 »

Not to jack the thread...but has anyone had luck downloading photos from Shutterfly share sites?

I just saved all my shared photos back into my account, and tried to download from there.

I received an email stating that high res photos might take up to 14 days. (A zip file downloaded, but it does not appear to be high res photos).

Anyone know how this works? Do I receive another email once high res photos are available?

Thanks!
Topic Author
Wabbit
Posts: 205
Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2009 3:12 pm

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by Wabbit »

Thanks for the suggestions! Looks like smugmug and the band app are the top alternatives folks are moving to.
Anyone know how this works? Do I receive another email once high res photos are available?
I have downloaded albums in the past, and the process worked like you just described. After a while I received another email with a link to download a zip of the album. I haven't tried this with any share site albums yet though. (gotta get those copied into my personal account soon...)
shess
Posts: 2164
Joined: Wed May 17, 2017 12:02 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by shess »

Huh, what do you know ....

My scout troop used share sites since 2012, and many of the people involved are no longer active (or maybe not even reachable). So I wrote a script to scrape everything down for posterity, and I just finished cleaning it up a bit for sharing. https://github.com/dshess/shutdl if anyone is interested. It is based on Puppeteer (a node.js thing), it literally runs a captive browser to pull things down. This is about as reliable as it sounds like, and I rather expect you need to be a software engineer to run it successfully.

Unfortunately, as best I can tell the only way to get full-res originals is for the person who originally uploaded the photos to download them.

[EDIT: Apologies if this skirts any rules about self-promotion. I'm retired, and as best I can tell there's no material upside to me for traffic to this script, which will only be useful for about a month longer ...]
chet96
Posts: 218
Joined: Fri Feb 21, 2020 8:14 am

Re: Shutterfly ending the share sites

Post by chet96 »

Wabbit wrote: Wed Feb 22, 2023 11:09 pm Thanks for the suggestions! Looks like smugmug and the band app are the top alternatives folks are moving to.
Anyone know how this works? Do I receive another email once high res photos are available?
I have downloaded albums in the past, and the process worked like you just described. After a while I received another email with a link to download a zip of the album. I haven't tried this with any share site albums yet though. (gotta get those copied into my personal account soon...)
Just a heads up - after you click save, it kicks out an error saying something like file folder names not found. But, if you continue, it will allow you to name a destination folder, and saves the files back to your personal account.

Unfortunately, downloading from your personal account loses the file folder name. (Which stinks - because our share site was organized by month).

I'm in the processing of downloading them, but would really like the highest res possible.
Post Reply