Shutterfly is a platform where consumers can share, print, and preserve their photos for either personal or commercial purposes. It has more than 10 million clients worldwide, receiving well over 26 million orders yearly, and hosting fifty thousand million pictures in its storage platform.
As you can imagine, Shutterfly handles a lot of images...... A LOT! When you handle that many, many, many images, properly managing them might become a nightmare. The big challenge we had was to develop a platform that would help them to properly manage, store, purge, and classify that huge amount of data.
We brought together several engineers who specialized in the development of internal tools in order to analyze the issue our client was having. Through a product discovery process, we decided to build a scalable tool that would not only enable the internal handling of stock in the catalog but would also facilitate the process to upload new products, while also keeping potential errors at a minimum.
After 3 years of working with Shutterfly, we were able to develop and maintain a scalable tool for internal use, which is currently used by the client to manage every aspect of its stock in a quick and safe way. Right now the platform is seamlessly handling millions of images in a performant and scalable way.