Shutterfly goes public

Shutterfly, a photo sharing and printing website, has had a long association with Picasa - they were one of the original 4 partner sites (along with Ofoto, Snapfish, and Walmart) when Picasa 2 launched in January 2005.  It just held an IPO, raising about $87 million, and giving the company a market capitalization of about $354 million.

To reach the service from within Picasa, users in the USA who use the Create > Order prints and products... menu option can choose Shutterfly from the list of offered photo processors.  After logging in, Picasa then uploads your selected photos onto the service.

The Shutterfly service offers a fairly similar shared albums experience to Picasa Web Albums, with the added ability to order physical prints of the images.  Albums are nominally unlisted (there is no search facility within the service), and are viewable only by those who can get hold of the album URL - which would normally be by you sending out the URL of your albums via email.  However, like Picasa Web Albums, the URLs are general, and do not require logging in or validation to view, and many have made their way into the Google search index:

• Shutterfly albums via Google search - "about 8,950"
• Picasa Web Albums via Google search - "about 6,760"

However, Shutterfly goes one better, allowing collections to also be password protected if required, so just having the URL is not always sufficient.

Images from Shutterfly albums may not be hotlinked from other web pages - (PicasaWeb allows for limited hot linking).  Space for online storage is free and unlimited, though Pro Galleries are charged for, but give the opportunity to earn money when people order your prints.

You can also download the Shutterfly Studio, a Windows desktop application with similar functionality to Picasa, which allows for managing images, editing them, and uploading, sharing and printing them.  One feature it offers that Picasa is sorely lacking is the ability to view more than one image at once - for a side by side comparison.