Up until the end of last year I always got photos printed and put them into albums. However, since having my two dc I've taken so many pictures that I'm running out of shelf space for all the albums. With this in mind I decided that this year I was going to start a photobook at the beginning of January, add pages to it every time I took pictures of a day out or family event, then order it at the start of January next year, so there would just be one book to find shelf room for this year instead of half a dozen more albums. I decided to use Snapfish for this as I've ordered from them before and I've always been happy with their photo products.
I started the book as planned and have made ten pages so far. Each page takes a while to do - selecting which photos to include, arranging them, adding text and so on - and I was really pleased that I'd been able to keep it up to date rather than having a huge backlog of photos to sort out after several months. I'd set aside this evening to add a few more pages as it was dc2's birthday last week.
But! This afternoon I happened to read an email from Snapfish, sent yesterday, in which they said they were launching their new website on March 23rd. Great, lots of new editing tools and so on, sounds good. Then almost as an afterthought at the end of the email it mentioned that all current projects need to be finished and ordered by March 22nd or they'll be lost, as they won't be carried over to the new website! I've spoken to someone on their live chat, who said there was nothing they could do. it's been escalated to what the person on live chat called their 'expert customer service' but I'm not hopeful that they'll be able to save my project as apparently the new site uses a totally different tool.
Surely I can't be the only person who has started an ongoing project like this?! They even have templates with the months of the year set out through the book - I can't imagine everyone else sits down with a years worth of photos and makes an entire book in one go? It'd take me days just to sort out which pictures to use, never mind actually assemble them in a book. I was hoping to do it in bits and pieces as and when I had an hour spare, but now it looks like I've wasted all the time I've spent on it so far this year 
AIBU?
To be massively unimpressed with Snapfish
KayElleBee · 06/03/2016 22:20
Matt, they haven't lost my work yet, but they're almost certainly going to on March 22nd. I can't get it printed because you need to have a minimum of 20 pages and I only have ten so far, but even if I made another ten, the idea was to have a book of 2016, not a book of the first 2.75 months of 2016. I explained why I stopped printing the actual photos - the storage space taken up by one book is a lot less than several photo albums.
Anchor, I just checked my Snapfish account after reading your comment about them wiping them periodically. They've got every photobook and calendar I've ever made on there going back to 2011, so they've never wiped any of mine. Up until this point it looks like they've never changed their software so significantly that it's meant losing everyone's projects, which is why it didn't occur to me that this could be an issue.
I just think it's unacceptable to let people spend their time on creating projects on the website, then suddenly announce that they're all going to disappear in just over a fortnight with no option to save them. I treat making photobooks a bit like scrapbooking - I like to do a bit at a time when I'm in the mood for it, not spend hours upon hours doing it all in one go, months after the events in the pictures when little details have been forgotten.
Locally hosted software is an option I haven't considered recently so I'll look into that, thank you, although I'm wary of losing the whole lot if the laptop dies. I expected it would be safer stored online 
Last time I used downloaded photobook software I seem to remember it being quite clunky, but maybe it's improved since then.
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. To respond to a few, you can email yourself a link to the book, it doesn't send the actual book to your email though so I doubt it will be accessible after the old site closes. I also get that it isn't officially a storage site, although seeing as they have stored 20-odd creations and thousands of photos of mine, going back to 2011, I don't think it was unreasonable to create and save an ongoing album on there with the intention of printing it when it was finished. Jenny, your way sounds great, not sure my editing skills are up to it though! (and I don't have Photoshop, only the basic photo editing program that came with the laptop and that wouldn't do it).
Hadn't heard of Blurb, I'll have a look, thanks. Screenshotting each page is the best I could come up with too, then as you say, at least I'll have that to work from if I have to redo them all. And no, I'm not paying to access the site and I'm aware that they're a private company and can do as they please, I'm just annoyed that they've chosen now to do this while I'm mid-project and they're not offering any option to keep current unfinished work. It's not good customer service. I could have made a year long album in this way during any of the last five years and not had an issue with it as they've used the same platform all that time. At least they did it now though and not in November - small mercies I guess! 
Will see if they get back to me by email today as they said they would.
So what you are saying is that despite you not having to pay for this and you knowing it isn't a storage site you are pissed off with them for making a change to their site that would benefit the majority of its users.
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