I’m just in shock that it’s such a painful and buggy process to get a photo book printed on Shutterfly, Snapfish or Ofoto. After wasting a painful hour struggling with each, I gave the nod to Snapfish because I was actually able to get what I wanted in the end. But it wasn’t pretty.
I’ve been a Shutterfly user for years, mostly for holiday cards and occasionally wallet prints for grandparents. It’s been fine. But making a photo book was rendered impossible on top of being frustrating because the software was broken — images wouldn’t show up on the pages once placed so there was no way to see what the pages looked like. The preview mode just blew up without showing anything. I’m running Firefox 2, and this is 2008. QA? I don’t think so.
Snapfish was brutally frustrating because the default layout for a book was a varied layout for the pages so that to get a consistent one-per-page-with-same-background it seems you have to click through each page and set the layout and background manually. I tried the little checkbox for “Apply to all pages” but no luck there. At least the pictures show up as you drag them into place, and adding pages wasn’t too bad. But if you use a picture twice, there’s no indication so it’s up to you to notice. User Experience design? I don’t think so.
As for Ofoto, I was so disappointed in the quality of the printed book I ordered from them a few months ago that I’m not going to give them another chance to show me more poor software.
My daughter suggested that next time we should just print them ourselves and make our own book. She may be right.
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