Shutterfly vs Flickr
When comparing Shutterfly vs Flickr, the Slant community recommends Flickr for most people. In the question“What is the best cross-platform photo backup and viewer service?” Flickr is ranked 5th while Shutterfly is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Flickr is:
Flickr has an app on Windows, OSX, iOS and Android, called Flickr Uploadr (available for download in the [tools](https://www.flickr.com/tools/) section) that can automatically upload images to Flickr. It can even pull images from external drives and other cloud storage services such as iCloud.
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Pros
Pro Used by a lot of sports teams for free photo gathering
Pro Can be set to auto-upload images
Flickr has an app on Windows, OSX, iOS and Android, called Flickr Uploadr (available for download in the tools section) that can automatically upload images to Flickr. It can even pull images from external drives and other cloud storage services such as iCloud.
Pro Photos are backed up elsewhere
I mainly use Google Photos and keep separate local backup of all my photos, but also use the IOS app which transfers all new photos onto Flickr storage as well.
Pro Good search
Flickr is capable of searching images by a combination of content, color, shape, depth of field, style, pattern, size, license and other options.
Pro Built-in image recognition
Flickr will automatically attempt to figure out the contents of a picture and tag them appropriately. This will allow you to look for, for example, all images of flowers, bridges or butterflies.
Cons
Con Hard to download photos
Downloads are limited to single photos, not full albums.
Con No Lightroom integration
Shutterfly apparently has or had an API for uploading photos, but the only Lightroom plugin to do so is outdated and crashes while trying to upload.
Con Poor site design
There are multiple "silos" in the site with different user interfaces for the same function, and with different bugs in each. For instance, trying to import from Flickr the support person had me navigate to the Flickr connection UI via Create Photo Book (which actually worked, but didn't give me an easy way for others to draw from my Flickr-hosted photos), because the "Connect to Flickr" function in the main upload screen was broken. Albums in "My Photos" have drastically different capabilities compared to albums in "Shared Sites". This leads to confusion and completely unhelpful support/help documentation.
Con No offline view
While Google Photos and iCloud Photo Library allow you to select if you want to keep local copies of your photos, Flickr only allow you to view your photos online.
Con There are limits on file sizes
Images can't be more than 200MB a piece and each video can't take up more than 1GB of space.
Con No support for lossless file formats
Photos can only be saved as .jpg, .gif (non-animated) and .png files.
