Review: Shutterfly Album

This is the story of how we ended up with 3 wedding albums.  It all started by wanting to save money. 

While many albums are absolutely gorgeous (and drool worthy, believe me, I've drooled), we weren't sold on the idea of spending $1000+ for our wedding album.  I searched a lot of sites, I looked at Adorama based on recommendations, and I just wasn't feeling anything.  I didn't want to start from scratch and design pages in InDesign.  I didn't care about the book laying flat.  Long story short, I just about gave up on getting an album.

Motherdrome wouldn't hear of it though.  She wanted an album and she wanted it yesterday.  So she suggested Shutterfly.   I had made a little album of our engagement pictures for free thanks to a coupon.  My mom had really liked that one and requested another of our wedding with a leather cover.  So I started to experiment.  Turns out that I really liked the storyboard method of choosing photographs.  I really liked the limited layout choices (too many choices makes me freeze).  I liked it so much, that I made one for my parents, Mr. Palindrome's parents, all of our grandparents and one for ourselves. 

(I love Mr. Palindrome in the background - this is our new life, me blogging and taking pictures around him doing homework!) 

 When our album arrived, I was really excited.  We sat on the couch, tearing off the orange cardboard box.  We ooohed.  We awwed.  We reminisced.  Then we saw that one page printed twice (their bad) and that I had cropped one photo too close so it was blurry (my bad). 

After updating the page where I made a mistake, I called customer service.  They were great and said they'd reprint it right away!  Yay!

After opening the second album, I immediately saw a problem.  The binding was loose.  Also, they reprinted from the previous file, so my mistake was still there.

I called customer service.  Again, they were great and said that they would a credit in my account so that I could change my mistake and have it reprinted at my convenience.

About a month later, I got everything together and was ready to hit order.  There was no voucher in my account.  It had expired.  Sigh.  Another call to customer service cleared it up, they put the credit back into my account and I ordered the third album.  Thankfully the third album was just dandy. 

I'm very pleased with the print quality and the colors.  I love the full page pictures.

I'm just a little bummed about having to reprint so many times, but customer service was helpful each time.

And my experience didn't stop me from ordering a small album for our honeymoon as well!

Was an album important to you?  Would you consider a DIY album?