Shutterfly has deleted millions of photos from countless users simply because those users hadn't made a purchase in a certain period of time. Apparently, this policy change was sent out via email in possibly September 2022 and January 2023 but many people using old email accounts likely never saw it. 

I am one of these people who recently lost 20 years+ of photos. I tried to contact Shutterfly customer service and one of their reps told me, "Maybe you should have updated your email address," when I told her them that I didn't get any emails because I don't use the account for email.

And yes, she is right.  But that doesn't make this any less painful and that is a horrible way to talk to a distraught customer.

I know I am not alone in having an online account connected to an email that I don't use for email. And while I don't use the email address associated with the account to check email, I had used it to log into Shutterfly as recently as the first week of April and all my photos were there. And there was no warning I was at risk of losing them in days.

As someone who runs a web-based platform, I know that they can tell when people log in and I am so curious as to why they didn't have warnings or alerts in people's actual accounts. Wouldn't that have saved a lot of hurt? Wouldn't that have gotten back a lot of customers? I also noticed that there was nothing on their social media, at least nothing I found yet.

While on the chat with the online representative, I did reset the password to that old email and got into my email account. I didn't see any emails after January about the deletion of my photos. (And I can't believe they didn't send them out daily from March 1 on!) But I did notice that I can still see photos in the Shutterfly emails that include memories. I can also click on those photos and see full size versions of them. That means that all my photos are not permanently gone - at least not all of them, otherwise I wouldn't be able to bring them up. They are being hosted somewhere and Shutterfly should restore them to my account, along with any other photo they can tie to an old account. 

I'd be willing to pay a fee for this and would love to help their team ensure that they do a better job communicating with customers in the future.

I lost photos of when I was pregnant, photos from my early twenties before kids, photos of milestones and trips. I know I am not alone in being both incredibly devastated and also angry with myself that I didn't do a better job at storing them in a more reliable place. I am crushed and I really hope Shutterfly will respond to me and all of us who are feeling really terrible right now. 

After all, they do have that 100% Happiness Guarantee.