Yeah, zazzle is tedious. I'm not a super large fan of their platform, although it does work, it could be a lot more user friendly. I'll go on a zazzle kick, make a bunch of crap (that people actually buy, amazingly) and then lost interest in doing any more new products for another 6 months.
It's work. We all know work sucks. Could it be easier? Definitely. But they aren't drinking from the same stock photo water supply that the rest of the agencies are. Pulling metadata from our images automatically, that would speed up the process by a ton.