Shutterfly
9 May 2023
Shutterfly fortunately realized their mistake and gave us until the 30th to access photos. They did not make it easy though. You cannot just get all the photos. You can download then one by one, or sometimes you can download a whole album. I say sometimes because the process barely works. Once you click "download" on an album then you are presented a modal that says you will be emailed a link to download when the pictures are ready. No email ever comes though. Fortunately a message briefly appears in the lower left of the screen and, if you manage to click it, then you are redirected to the download screen. On this screen is a cloud which may be loading forever. But, if you are lucky, in 15 minutes to a half hour when you refresh the page there's a downloadable zip file or files available. But wait, there are more caveats. If you try to request more than one album download at a time at most one will work. And if the album has more than 50 pictures, then it will be broken up into multiple zip files (e.g. an album of 66 pictures will have one zip file of 50 pictures and one zip files of 16 pictures). This introduces another problem. Once you have asked for an album with 51-100 photos, then you cannot get an album of 50 or less to work anymore. I have not experimented with albums of more than 100 pictures yet for obvious reasons.
Now couple this frustratation with all the emotion involved in looking at old pictures. These pictures tell the tale of my kids' happy childhood where dad was always involved and loving and not at all the monster Cara has tried to characturize me as. And, because I was often behind the camera, when they're pictures of events she came to then I have to see her smiling face over and over again as I download each individual one. I gave her a happy life too for many years, but to hear her tell it now it was two decades of misery. When she was in grad school and I was supporting her and taking the kids to practices and social events and working full time she would say that she couldn't have done her studies without me. Now she says that she managed to do them in spite of me. This is why preserving these pictures is so important to me. So that hopefully one day my kids can look back and remember their lives as they were and not just through their mother's window of hate.
