Shutterfly and Photo Book Question UPDATE on page 2--I placed an order

Shutterfly has tons of sales and codes right now, so do it TONIGHT! It's so easy and they come out really nice. If you go to "special offers" you'll see all the codes and sales spelled out for you. I love shutterfly!

Essentially, I love shutterfly. I own mugs, coffee thermos, pillows, pictures, photobooks and ornaments. I could go on and on about how much I love them.

@Heather I was really surprised because I thought a big company like that would be good to their customers. Especially because if they looked at my account they could see that I had been purchasing stuff from them for many years. But when I sent them an email explaining the error, that the photobook that I received didn't match the preview, the custom service rep emailed me back and said something along the lines of "the book you received is exactly what was shown in the preview (sigh)". They actually typed out the word sigh. I thought that was super rude and no way to treat a customer.

@elizabeth i have a code for a free book if you would like it. that way you can see if you like them and if you don't you are only out of the shipping charges

I got a book and put photos in it and it will be my guest book. I left open places to sign. I love it but it was much bigger than I thought.. I should have gotten out my ruler and looked at the size lol

I've made several albums on Shutterfly. For the wedding, I made a 12x12 leather lay flat album and a regular hardcover 8x8 of some of the funny pictures. I got the 8x8 free and got a really great deal on the 12x12.

I personally find a lot of their layouts cheesy and too fake scrapbook-y so when I make them, I use either a plain black or white background throughout the book and keep embellishments at a minimum.

I haven't used shutterfly before for books, but I think I will be using them. I made two books with Mypublisher and really liked them.

For those of you who have used shutterfly or mixbook for a guestbook - was 8 by 8 big enough or did you feel larger was necessary? Thanks for the tip on mixbook, Maltese and others, I'd never heard of them before!

8x8 is a good size....try to think of a square children's book. If you remember Golden Books with the gold outside binding, thats about the size of them.

We did our guest book as a 8x11 book, but haven't gotten it yet. The size I think would releate to if you wanted to do a second album afterwards with wedding phots too or not? Do you want those the same size or larger than the engagement one?

And honestly, most of the shutterfly coupons i get come from junk mail from the knot when i signed up ages ago.

@chasity I actually have one free code! I wouldn't want to take yours Thank you very much though! That's a really sweet offer!

I created an 8x8 on shutterfly and then an 8.5x8.5 on mixbook. Since I need so many of them for gift purposes, I'm contacting mixbook's volume discount team. I'll let you know what they offer!

And I definitely plan on doing wedding photos this route as well. My plan is to purchase 8-10 photo books for parents and grandparents (and one for us as well) for both engagement and wedding albums.

I use Shutterfly for everything. Everyone comments on how elegant our book looks and they can't believe we made it ourself. I would purchase one that has lay-flat pages. Never had any issues with Shutterfly and customer service was great for me. I also create my own layouts - the ones they have (and all other companies are pretty lame looking).

I've used MyPublisher and Mixbooks in the past - very cheap looking. Difficult to use. My friends fell a part in a year. Not worth the hassle.

@kaegurl Thank you for the review! So it sounds like the layflat is really worth the upgrade fee!

We did a photo guestbook from shutterfly and I love the way it turned out! I also did a photo book of my bridal shower pictures. Its really easy to use.

@anna are you just going to use a sharpie or is there a better pen?

UPDATE:

I used both mixbook and shutterfly software to create pretty much the same photobook. I thought shutterfly's software was easier to use. I had an issue on mixbook doing a full two page spread with pictures, and I only figured it out once how to do it. The next couple of full page spreads, I had to actually copy the previous one and paste it in. Mixbook also had slightly fewer options from what I saw. However, mixbook had a huge sale going on so I was able to order the 8 lay flat books which I needed through mixbook for 55% off (this was better than the 30% sale on Shutterfly).

As the lay flat option is NOT cheap, I wanted to make sure to get the best deal. I think our parents and grandparents will be very happy with the gifts. I should receive them by August 12th.

The shipping on both sites are steep. Shutterfly had a free shipping option, but you couldn't combine some offers with free shipping (weird imo). Mixbook did not have a free shipping option, but a budget option which was $16 compared to $25 for shipping. Since I did not need these immediately, I took the $16 budget shipping.

I'll update with pictures and comments on quality once I receive the photo books. I still have plans to order an 8x8 book from shutterfly as I have a free coupon, so once I order that I'll update to comment on quality.

I am newly married & reading the thread about Mixbook/Shutterfly & I am totally interested in what your final results were &/or how the books held up to the test of time (I see your original post was from 2015). And if the results of each site were greatly different or pretty much the same quality?

I'll be interested to hear what you think. I'm a photographer and used my professional print lab to do our albums as I have never been impressed with Shutterfly, but it has been MANY years since I have used them. It would be great if the quality has improved, as it would be nice to have a consumer friendly option to recommend to others.

We did a 10x10 album for ourselves and 8x8 albums for our parents of my elopement and those sizes felt sufficient. I haven't yet decided whether to do another album for our wedding celebration. Layflat is definitely worth the extra cost!