My eyes were opened to this online photo store when a friend of my told me they were headquartered here in Austin, so I was anxious to try them out. I got married back in December so I figured the best test would be using them for my wedding photos and I was highly impressed with their system and their service. Albums can be seen online at:
http://members7.clubphoto.com/valerie944736/guest-1.phtml
1. Extremely easy upload process, even on a Mac!
The first thing that I liked was their upload software that allows you to easily create albums and upload pictures to that album via drag and drop from your desktop. They even have software for Mac OS9! It is very easy to use in either operating system I've found. You can upload like 99 pictures at a time, or 5 at a time from their website.
2. Your friends don't have to join to see your pics!
I like some of the other services I've joined, but I hate that my friends have to sign up for stuff to see the pictures if they don't have an account already. They get kind of annoyed too. You can see all the pics, even at high resolution, whether you have an account or not. Bonus!
3. Great prices!
Prints are 19 cents and you get a discount for being a gold or platinum member. Well worth the upgrade if you're a picture junkie like me. Gifts are also reasonably priced and they have pretty unique gifts as well like photo frosting for cakes!
4. Great Features!
You get an address books which remembers email addresses you've "shared" with before, a guestbook for people to "sign," a place to save your favorite friends' albums, editing capabilities, backgrounds, privacy settings, and more! Titling and captioning pictures is very easy using their web interface as you don't have to edit each one separately to do it. I also love the visitor count which shows you how many people have viewed your album.
5. Fast and nice quality pictures!
I always get my pictures very quickly and have never had a problem with the printing. The last order I placed on a Monday and had the pictures by Thursday.
However with all the good things there are always a few bad things as well. Here are the things that I do not like about using their website. Most of them are nitpicky but worth mentioning.
1. You can only have 99 pictures in a single album. Kind of limiting, especially for a wedding.
2. You cannot "move" albums into an order you want. The work around I found was to number your albums before the name. Since it by default puts them in alphabetical order it will put them in the order you want.
3. You cannot "move" pictures from one album to another. You can only "copy" the picture from album to another and then delete the original picture.
4. You cannot have categories within your album.
5. It keeps asking me to upgrade my account even though it's already upgraded full.
6. I love the fact they have backgrounds, but some are so dark and busy that you can't read the titles or captions. They need to be semi-transparent.
7. Here is the big one. I have a huge problem with their ordering system. If you're looking at an album and add pictures to your cart from it, in your cart all you see is the album name and how many pictures you ordered from it. There is no way to see which pictures from that album you've ordered in case you want to take off or add a few. You either remove the whole "album" from the cart or leave it. I had a hard time with my wedding photos because I ordered literally hundreds of photos and it was hard to keep up with which ones I had in my cart. They also came printed in a disorganized fashion as well.
Overall I like this site and recommend it to others. Obviously no site is perfect but I think with a few improvements it could be close!
Recommended:
Yes