If you have used Shutterfly in the past to store your photos, make sure to check your emails.
The image-sharing company changed its longstanding policy that offered free unlimited photo storage in January. Shutterfly sent several emails notifying users about the policy change and that they would have to make a purchase at least once every 18 months to keep photos stored or else all their images would be deleted on March 29.
Some customers missed the memo and temporarily lost access to all their precious photos.
Jodi Hahn has been using Shutterfly for two decades to upload and store thousands of her photos. She was working on a project earlier this month when she realized her images were gone. She contacted company representatives, who told her she had no options to retrieve her photos.
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“It feels like a death because everything is all there,” she said in an interview with NBC Boston. “Everything I’ve done — my kid’s birth in the hospital, every visitor they had, their first everything. Every Christmas morning, every school event .. and it’s just all gone.”
Hahn isn't alone. Others expressed their frustrations with the photo-archiving app on social media, with one user posting a TikTok claiming they have saved all their photos from the last 15 years on Shutterfly.
"Fifteen years' worth of memories, I no longer have," @jeanetteisley said in the TikTok video. "This is unacceptable."
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But no need to panic now. Shutterfly is restoring all photos and said users won’t lose access again until May.
“To ensure that all customers have plenty of time to access their photos and either make a purchase to keep their account active or download them to a personal device, we have extended the deadline to May 30, 2023,” the company said Thursday in a statement.
When Hahn learned Shutterfly was restoring photos from NBC Boston, she cried.
“That’s the best news ever. I can’t believe it. I’m so happy,” Hahn said. “This is so important to me and my family, and it’s such a big deal.”
Shutterfly says it may take some time to fully restore images to all users.
Learn more about how to preserve photos from Shutterfly here.
How to protect your photos stored online
One way to safely store your photos online is to ensure you have a backup — it’s even better if you have multiple backup plans.
External drives: These portable devices store photos, videos, documents and other types of data. Solid state drives (SSD) are often recommended for their fast transferring speeds and affordable prices.
Cloud services: These resources, such as Amazon Photos and Google Photos, offer free limited photo storage. All Amazon customers have access to 5 GB of storage, while every Google Account comes with 15 GB shared across the company’s services like Google Drive and Google Photos.
Subscribing to cloud services requires no hardware purchase. Be sure to create unique passwords for different subscriptions in case of a data breach.
Shutterfly's full statement is below:
In January 2023, we updated our photo storage policy to continue providing unlimited storage to active customers who make a purchase every 18 months. As part of this policy update, any photos stored in a customer’s inactive account would be removed from our servers. We sent several email notifications regarding this policy update to ensure that all our customers were informed of the changes.
However, we understand that a small number of our customers may not have received these emails because they had outdated account information on file or were not checking the email accounts on file.
To ensure that all customers have plenty of time to access their photos and either make a purchase to keep their account active or download them to a personal device, we have extended the deadline to May 30, 2023. As always, we encourage all customers to review their account information and update it as necessary to ensure that they receive important updates in the future.
NBC Boston's Leslie Gaydos and Asher Klein and NBC's Danielle Smith contributed to this story.
