When it comes to comprehensive photo hosting websites, Shutterfly wins hands down.  To visit the Shutterfly website for the first time, the novice might feel a bit overwhelmed.

Shutterfly offers a number of different services under free memberships as well as items that you pay for.  To access the service, you must sign up for a free membership. The membership will enable you to upload your photos and create a gallery of albums.

Your albums are the key to Shutterfly, and you control who has access to each album.  Shutterfly makes it very convenient to take images from your albums and turn them into prints.

The pricing for prints and gifts is very affordable and you can choose from standard print sizes or specialty gift items.  If you’d like to create a mug or note card from one of your images it is effortless to do so.

If your goal is to create prints and gifts from your photos, rather than looking for ways to embed your images into blogs or websites, than you’ll find Shutterfly advantageous.

Shutterfly provides you with plenty of tools to keep your images private as well.  After creating galleries you can password protect them.  Shutterfly is designed more as a way to sell your photos by turning them into items, than a site designed for easy viewing and distributing your photos across the Internet free of charge.  Professional photographers will find that by using Shutterfly they can easily and simply sell their photos.

However, these services are not included in the free membership.  To take access of the Pro Gallery and to begin selling your work through Shutterfly, you will need to sign up for a Pro or Premier account.  A Pro account will provide you with 5 gigabytes of space to host your photos and costs $99.00 a year.  The Premier account has unlimited hosting space and costs $199.00 a year.

The Shutterfly Pro and Premier galleries are perfect for the photographer who wants to open his or her online store, but isn’t ready to handle the technical aspect that comes with that endeavor.  Shutterfly will handle all financial transactions, and will also take care of shipping and customer service.

The photographer never needs to deal with these issues on a personal basis.  Also, you will get your own website address where customers can come and browse through your store.  Shutterfly provides a convenient and effortless way to host your own shop online.

One of the best features regarding Shutterfly, is that they ensure that viewers of your photo gallery store will not be able to right click and save any of your images.  Protecting the photographer’s copyrights to his or her images is of the utmost importance, and the Internet has made it easy for many to take images that do not rightfully belong to them.

Shutterfly understands the needs of photographers and encourages all to copyright protect the back of their photos.  Additionally, they have taken necessary steps to ensure that all photos are protected from unlawful use while in galleries.  Visitors will not be able to print screen or right click, copy and paste your images.