Shutterfly has announced upgrades to its photobook creation service with its new Storyboard tool. The Storyboard tool chooses an appropriate layout throughout the book based on the photos that you upload.
Press Release:
Make a Photo Book in No Time With Shutterfly’s New Storyboard Tool
Now It’s Even Easier to Tell Your Story With New Tools, Enhanced Features and Greater Design Selection
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Shutterfly, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFLY), the leading Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service, today introduced a series of enhancements to its award-winning photo book line that reduce the time it takes a customer to create a professional-looking photo book. The centerpiece is the new Storyboard Tool which makes it quick and easy to organize and add pictures to a photo book. Users simply choose the photos they want to include in their book and the Storyboard Tool automatically chooses a suitable layout to fit the number and orientation of their photos. For more information about Shutterfly’s Storyboard Tool, please visit http://www.shutterfly.com/photobooks/new_tools.jsp.
Storyboard Tool Puts the Story First
To further simplify the photo book experience, Shutterfly looked at how customers approached storytelling, using data from customer home visits and Shutterfly’s customer experience lab. The result is the new Storyboard Tool. Rather than requiring customers to choose a layout and fit their photos into the available spaces or spend time looking for a layout that matches their photo choices, the Storyboard Tool asks customers to simply group their photos in an order that reflects the story they are trying to tell. Shutterfly does the heavy lifting, choosing the layouts that best showcase the photo number and orientation.
Want to add another photo to a layout? Simply drag and drop additional photos onto any page and the layout automatically adjusts to accommodate the new images. Don’t like a selected layout? No problem. Shutterfly allows users to customize the layout of each page quickly and easily by displaying the full selection of photo layouts to the side of the photo book window.
“Since launching our photo book community, Shutterfly Gallery, earlier this year, we realized that our customers have a seemingly endless number of interesting stories just waiting to be told,” said Kathryn Olson, chief marketing officer of Shutterfly. “With our Storyboard Tool and other new photo book improvements, we hope to further inspire and encourage our community of storytellers by simplifying the process and speeding up the time it takes to preserve their memories.”
New Features Encourage Creativity and Eliminate Worry
Because choosing a layout is only part of the picture, Shutterfly today introduced new features for organizing, sorting and viewing photos before adding them to a photo book. Customers can now utilize the Pictures tab, which provides a large workspace to view and arrange photos. To organize photos, users can sort pictures by date taken, name or customize the order of their images.
In response to customer feedback, Shutterfly has also added more layouts to accommodate room for journaling and captioning and introduced new fonts and backgrounds to increase the options for personalization. With thousands of layout options and hundreds of background designs, it’s even easier for customers to find the right designs that reflect their personal story.
Adding a level of reassurance to the photo book process while encouraging experimentation, Shutterfly’s new undo layout feature restores pictures and text to the previous layout, so customers can test different layouts without losing their work. Spell check and auto-save further safeguard work, and of course, how-to tips and Shutterfly’s award winning customer service are available 24/7.
For more information on Shutterfly’s new photo book tools, please visit www.shutterfly.com/photobooks.
Scott Fillmer says
great, thanks for sharing that, good timing since I have been trying to shop around alternatives to lulu.