We just received this message from Shutterfly:

"Unfortunately, after careful consideration, we have made the very difficult decision to discontinue supporting Share Sites so that we can continue to enhance other products and services to better serve our customers.

Effective March 25, 2023, all Share Sites will be deactivated, and users will no longer have access to Share Sites content."

We have a number of photo albums on the site and now are trying to find a replacement site with the same features. We are looking into Flickr, SmugMug, Memento and others. Is anyone else in the same situation and found a good solution?

Thanks for any help.

Skip Osborn
FLHS '62

Hi Skip,
We currently use SmugMug and Memento (formerly used Flickr but moved that data to SmugMug, who now owns Flickr). None of the three have the exact same feature set as Shutterfly Share Sites. We have found SmugMug to be VERY good for both photos and videos. However, their slideshow feature is somewhat limited.

We use WIX databases frequently for photo albums. They offer a lot of different options and their "Free" version is fine if you can put up with their frequent sales pitches. They have a number of different slider and carousel options and the best photo display quality.

Phil,

Thanks for your comments, it has been very helpful.

I spent some time experimenting to find the best solution to copy over our 27 Shutterfly Share albums to the other services suggested by you. I came to the conclusion that there is no way to fully create the share experience on other sites. The primary problem is that Shutterfly does not allow (as far as I can tell) downloading their share files with all the added comments and editing. This basically depends on how the pictures were uploaded to Shutterfly. We chose to upload the raw pictures and edit them individually and add comments using the Shutterfly Share utilities. When these pictures are either moved to another Shutterfly account or downloaded to a computer only the original (unedited) pictures are sent. Therefore, when a new service is selected only the original pictures are uploaded, rotation and all. As it turns out many of our more than 1,300 pictures have to be edited to rotate them and comments added manually (the only “comments” that show up are the picture file titles.) So, the transfer can be done but there is considerable work (in our case) to get back to the full, shared experience. The other problem is the additional cost of the other share sites. It comes down to does the class budget allow for it or are contributions needed.

Let me know if I misinterpreted or don’t fully understand the details of the information I gathered. Or, are there other solutions I could try.

Thanks for any help.

Skip Osborn