Shutterfly for Christmas

I think I've mentioned before how much I love Christmastime. One of my favorite parts of Christmas is giving and receiving Christmas cards and photo albums.
I love seeing how our friends and families have grown and changed over the years. Our family has been sending photo cards or cards with photos inserted for the past 9-10 years. I love sharing photos of our little family. For some of our extended family and friends this is the only time they see how our children have grown.
I love Shutterfly for so many reasons. I take a lot of pictures-a lot! {Like 400 a month-I know!} For a long time I used Kodak Gallery for my photo printing but I wasn't totally thrilled with the process or quality. Last year I tried Shutterfly. I got my pictures much faster than I had in the past and the quality was much better. Plus they have cool features like printing the date the photo was taken on the back of the card. That's a big deal for me-especially when I order in large batches-it makes organizing my photos soooo much easier. Now Shutterfly has the Express Uploader tool. It's a program that is on your computer desktop that lets you upload pictures to Shutterfly with just a few clicks of your mouse. So cool.
I use Shutterfly a lot at Christmas time. It's a hectic time of year for us, so I don't have a lot of time. But I want to give thoughtful presents-things people will treasure for years to come. Thank goodness for the photo book.
I've made a number of photo books with Shutterfly. Each and every one of them have turned out great. Photo books are quick and easy to do and make excellent gifts. Each year I make my mother in law a photo book of the boys.  I usually do an 8x8 hardcover album-she loves them! You can go here to try it for yourself. If you are at your child's school a lot and are able to take pictures of the students, this would make a great teacher gift, too.
My plan this weekend is to work on Christmas cards. All of our cards have photos in them. I hand make some {for close family and friends} but everyone else gets a photo card. You'd think it would be a super quick and easy thing but Shutterfly has over 800 designs! Oh my. Of course once I decide it will be easy....but I have a tough time deciding. More choice is better than no choice though.
This was last year's card-which I loved! Love the blues and the cream. But I want to do something totally different this year.

I love cards that have non-traditional Christmas colors. There are so many choices-I found this card and this card and so many more. But I think I am leaning towards this card. Love that I can put individual pictures of the boys and write a little note. And how much fun is that font!
This is my Shutterfly weekend-I'll be finishing up the photo albums and getting the Christmas cards ready to order. {I'm going to try to sneak in some time to scrapbook, too!}