Bendable Media

I have to hand it to Shutterfly. They hit me with a product pitch I couldn’t resist. I’ve used Shutterfly to order photos and photobooks for several years. In recent months, I’ve even started to upload iPhone pictures to Shutterfly using the service’s handy iPhone app. (Thumbs up).

But I don’t love Shutterfly. In fact, I don’t like their boring photo posters.

The Qoop photo poster, a family favorite

The photo posters I do like come from another online photo service, Qoop. It can be difficult to sift through a year’s worth of family pictures to pick just a few for a calendar. How do you pick one (or 12) cute photos of your kids? You can’t! You can put a lot in a photobook, but then you need to organize it. That can take time.

With Qoop, all that choosing and thinking goes out the door. Just upload all the photos you like and put them on a poster. You can fit more than 100 images on a Qoop poster, which becomes a cool array of thumbnail images that do a great job of encapsulating the year.

The kids love these Qoop posters and we now have two in our house. One is titled “Family Pictures 2009″ and the other is “Family Pictures 2007.” Sorry, 2008.

Back to Shutterfly.

A few days after ordering the Qoop poster, Shutterfly sent me an email pitch that caught me eye. I suspect three things happened that led to the pitch:

1. I was searching Shutterfly for a cool photo product to capture 2009 and didn’t find anything I liked.

2. I recently uploaded a bunch of iPhone photos to Shutterfly I wanted to consider for that photo project.

3. I went straight from Shutterfly to Qoop, where I then made the poster.

Shutterfly, like all the photo services I have used — Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, Moo (love the MiniCards!) — sends too many email pitches. But this one worked because it was highly personalized.

A self-portrait of the boy

The pitch featured just the photos I had uploaded from my iPhone and turned those into a 20-page photobook. It led off with one of the cutest pics I have of the boy — a self portrait, no less — and then followed through with about 40 mostly delightful photos. (Mostly my kids, of course.)

They built the photobook for me, all I had to do was say yes. Shutterfly wanted $16 for the photobook and I gladly paid.

I largely left their automated work alone, but I did add a few photos and rearranged a few pages. (Smart to include that customization.) Those changes took about 25 minutes, mostly due to some indecision on how many birthday pictures I wanted to add. (I forgot to include photos from the boy’s 6th birthday party to the Qoop poster. Sigh.)

Mostly, the photobook I ordered was the same Shutterfly pitched. I have no idea how often this particular pitch works, but it was a home run for me. (Dear Shutterfly: Don’t misread this as permission to send more email pitches. Thank you.)

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