Shutterfly Photo Sharing Capabilities

Enable Bulk Download Like Dropbox, C'mon!

The User Experience Problem

Shutterfly is a very useful platform to store and print images. It is also quite easy to share images with friends and family. The issue, however, is that shared images cannot be downloaded in bulk by recipients. Those shared images must be downloaded individually instead. This is an utter waste of time when the functionality already exists for bulk downloads.

Shutterfly has bulk downloads available for photos stored in user accounts. Users can select their photos, click to download all selected photos, and then download those photos once Shutterfly emails a download link. Realistically this should mimic Dropbox and just begin downloading automatically in a zipped folder, but at least a bulk download option is somewhat available.

When a user shares photos with another person, those photos may not be downloaded or saved in bulk. The image below is a screenshot showing the existing interface for shared photos.

The U/X Solution

Add functionality to download all photos. Allow users to click a photo to select it which will then change the download all button to “Download (1) Selected.” Select another photo, and the button updates to “Download (2) Selected.” And so on.

And / Or, once the user signs into their Shutterfly account after clicking to view the shared photos, create a folder of the shared images in the user’s account when they click “Go to Photos.” Clicking “Go to Photos” currently just takes you to your Shutterfly account without any of the shared images present. If you could view the shared photos in your Shutterfly account, then you could bulk download the photos with the existing functionality.

Conclusion

Individually downloading photos is quite a pain. It is a major time drain to download each photo. It also results in not being sure if you downloaded all the images unless you double check the number of images downloaded and compare the count to the number of images shared with you that is listed in the email invite to view those images.

Adding a download all button, allowing users to download photos that are selected, or creating a folder of the images in the Shutterfly account when clicking “Go to Photos” will alleviate this unnecessary burden.

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