Photo Gifts

Lookie, lookie what I got in the mail! A bright ORANGE Shutterfly package!

I have been a loyal Shutterfly user for a while. I have photos in my account all the way back to 2006. I love that Shutterfly stores your photos forever, without making you buy anything. Other photo sites require you to buy something at least once a year, or they delete your photos. Shutterfly stores them for free! AND they store them in the full-size resolution you upload.

Another thing I love about Shutterfly? They are constantly sending me coupons and great deals to order items at a large discount. The photo above shows most of the items I recently ordered: 5 folded greeting cards, 30 prints, an 8x8 photo book and an 8.5x11 photo book. My total cost was $34.66. I took advantage of all kinds of deals: free shipping, free photo books, 20% off photo books, and free cards.

See that photo book on the left side of the photo? That’s the 8x8 album I ordered with photos I took this past year. When it arrived, I was amazed at the book’s photo quality. There were details I hadn’t noticed when looking at the photos on my computer.

Do you also see the little Shutterfly brochure in the bottom right-hand corner of that photo? That’s their brochure with all of their Christmas cards and photo gifts for this season. Oh, man! There are some really cute cards there. I can’t decide if I like the single-photo cards like this or if I like the collage photo cards like this. Simple is good, but I’m also into more-bang-for-your-buck. I really like the ones that let you include more photos on the inside of the card AND text. Pretty cool! Shutterfly also offers a great service: you can have the cards addressed, stamped and mailed by them. Hmmm… tempting.

Every year for Christmas, we order a photo book for the grandparents. I think photos are the perfect gift: usually a photo is something the recipient doesn’t already have, and it’s a gift that is personal and meaningful. For the grandparents’ album, we include photos from the previous year’s June to the current year’s June (Katie’s birthday month). That way we can include photos of Christmas each year. If we made the album with photos from January to December and gave it to them in December, we’d always be missing Christmas photos. And by doing June to June, we can compile the album earlier in the year and take advantage of Shutterfly’s sales.

I’d highly recommend Shutterfly products if you’re looking for some good Christmas gift ideas or still deciding on your annual holiday cards. And if you go to this link and sign up to blog about their products, you can score some free cards too!