My family recently had a vacation and there were LOTS of pictures taken by different people. We live far apart and would now like to share the pictures. Is there a good way to do this?
In looking at limewire it appears we would need to each be a member of gmail or facebook to do this. Or I could just make the pictures available to everyone but that isn’t something I really want to do.
I could burn a DVD but then that would require snail mail and I’m thinking in this digital age there has to be a better way.
e-mail is out as there are gigs of data to be transferred.
I briefly checked photobucket but I didn’t see a way to download photos from them.
I was thinking there might be a way to do something like remote desktop connection but I’m unsure how to setup my home PC to do that (vista).
I’m not clear whether you want people to be able to look at the pictures or to download them. If just looking at them, a site like Flickr or Photobucket is fine. With Flickr, you can download other people’s pictures as long as the permissions are right.
Another way would be to copy the pictures onto a CD and mail the CD to your other family members.
I would like others (specifically family members) to be able to download them. I looked at snapfish but there you can’t download the pictures in highres format unless you pay for that. I’ll check out flickr and see what they offer.
I know I can put them on a CD, but again I was hoping there would some other way to transfer them without having to mail them.
If you have gigabytes of data (as you say in the OP) then all the photos won’t fit on a single CD, you would need at least a single-sided DVD if you want to fit it on one disc. Also, depending on connection speed, downloading gigabytes of data might take hours or even more.
If it was that much data, and everyone wants to have all the photos, I would burn them to DVD and send them out to each family.
Another possibility, if people just want to download a bunch of files without necessarily looking at them first, would be to upload everything to a site like dropbox which has something like up to 2GB disk space for a free account.
Sure, you can package the pix up into a handful of big ZIP files, but hopefully Grandma has a fast broadband line.
Two gig over dialup might be slower than waiting for the mailman to bring a DVD in the mail.
If you want to control who has access to the images, mailing out DVDs is probably the only guaranteed way, and it’s a lot simpler than trying to set up a website with permissions.
Picasa has a feature called “Collaborative albums”. When you upload your pictures, there’s a check box that says “Let people I share with contribute photos”. I haven’t used it myself, but it seems fairly straightforward and might be what you’re looking for.
On Flickr you get to put up 200 photos for free; if you want more you have to pay a nominal sum to become a ‘pro’ member. You can restrict viewing to youself, your family or your friends if you want, although they’d have to join to see your photos and be put on your list. There’s the ability for people to annotate and comment on your pictures, as well, which might be useful.
If there are several of you, you could create your own Group and control membership and viewing that way, I think.
