Warning: Shutterfly to Zap Photos of Older Customer Accounts

Unless you’ve purchased something from Shutterfly in the last 18 months, the company will zap your photos – permanently. In a letter to customers, the photo storage and personalized products maker said it changed its policy in January. It will provide unlimited photo storage only to active Shutterfly customers who make a purchase at least once every 18 months.

“On March 29, 2023, all inactive account projects and photos will be permanently deleted,” according to the notification email from Shutterfly, which hosts over 100 billion photos.

According to the website, “There’s no better way to back up your images than with Shutterfly’s unlimited photo storage service.” But the clock is ticking if you haven’t used the account in a while to make a purchase.

The letter told customers there were two ways to protect their photos stored on its servers: either download them to their own device, or “Make a purchase of any amount to reactivate your Shutterfly account — your photos and projects will be safely stored for another 18 months.”

Instructions on downloading photos are found on this Shutterfly help page, where it states, “Downloaded photos do not include any edits made using our online tools, such as cropping, color effects, or red eye removal.”

More information about the change is available on Shutterfly. And you can find FAQs on this page.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.