Recommendations for P2P photo sharing software?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I just returned from a week in Paris and I have a ton of photos that I want to share with friends and family.

I’ve used various server-based (hosted) web sites in the past, but the upload time is horrendous, especially to do the couple of hundred photos I have.

Therefore, I concluded that a peer-to-peer solution would be ideal for photo sharing. I did some research and found a lot of alternatives, but nothing seemed to be perfect. My requirements are simple: I want to avoid the initial uploading of all my photos to a central server, and I want to be able to add a descriptive sentence or two to each photo.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of software? Anything you’d recommend?

2

Assuming you only want a few people to get the photos, I’d go with a messenger program (gAIM is very good), and simply send the pictures directly to who wants them.

3

MSN Messenger, ICQ, AIM, any chat program has the ability to transfer files of any kind. My brothers and I scan and send photos to each other all the time. Works like a charm.

4

Even if you do use P2P the person at the other end is still loading the pictures from your harddrive so the upload time will still horrendous.

At least if you put it up on a website, you only have to load them once and let many people download them many times.

If you do it through P2P and 10 people want to look at the photos each one is being uploaded from your computer 10 times.

5

Er, no.

P2P means that the peopel downloading off the main provider share the photos off each other as well, thus reducing the load on the main provider.

MP shares file to A

B gets file from A and MP

C gets file from A, B and MP

but also, A may at the same tiem be getting other parts of the file from B and C.

You might want to try bittorrent, but it can get a bit tricky… or as someone else has suggested, foist off that bandwidth on another website/download style thingy

6

As Tabby_Cat points out, P2P will share the bandwidth requirements for downloading, assuming there are enough people to make this work. However, that wouldn’t necessarily be true in my situation.

Simple photo sharing via email or via an AIM equivalent is impractical because I have about a gigabyte worth of photos to share. The cumulative size of the files to upload is the main reason I wanted to avoid the “normal” photo web sites.

Some of the P2P services automatically reduce the size of the photo to a manageable size, to make the whole process practical. The simplicity of it all was attractive to me. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a service that’ll do the reduction and allow comments to be entered. I researched about a dozen of the P2P photo sharing service providers.

It occurs to me that the easiest solution might be to simply reduce the size of each photo manually, and then upload the smaller images to the web site I normally use to share just a few photos.

7
      • A P2P program is just a customized FTP server with a search utility built-in. For what you wish to do, I would suggest using an FTP server on my own computer, such as FileZilla Server:
        http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/
        …a free, open-source FTP-server (get the server, not the client). You just set up a single account with an alphanumeric username and password, share the folder that the photos are in, and set a username and password, set the simultaneous connections to 2 or 3 (I would), and then anyone with a regular web browser can connect, any time your computer is on and the FTP program is running [you leave it running all the time]–you just need to send them an FTP link. The format for an automatic login FTP link is-- ftp://username:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:yy
        –where the xxx’s are your IP address, and yy is the port number you are using (21 is standard FTP).
  • Of course this does not get around the problem of each photo being uploaded multiple times for each different person who requests it, but the only way around that is to use a remote server, as already said. For the description, I would just make a text file the same name as each photo filename. You can even set up different folders and name them appropriately, and people connecting will see them as well (in Filezilla, you would need to enable “allow access to subfolders” for this).
  • Also–if you turn on “event logging” in the FTP server, it will keep a text file of all connection attempts. If you look at this, you will see a LOT of random web addresses trying to log on with random password attempts. This is pretty typical for a FTP server, and is expected–it’s the reason why you pick a “solid” alphanumeric username and password. People scan the net for open FTP’s and if it is not open, they try lists of passwords to see if they can get in. On a fast connection, your log file may be over 100K in just a few days–so you can pretty much turn off event logging. …If the thought of lots of strangers attempting to connect to your computer disturbs you, then you can use another port number if you want, the port numbers go from zero up to 65,535–but some ISP’s block FTP transactions on other ports. And you can test the FTP server after starting it, by opening a browser and entering your own FTP link–you should “see” the folder you want shared.
  • For the record, Win2K and XP have a FTP server built-in I think–but I would not use it, considering MS’s many other security problems. FileZilla is open-source and very well-tested, and doesn’t cost anything.
  • P2P programs like bittorrent are good in concept, but they would require your viitors to also download and install the program, and figure out how to use it. If you have a static IP address, then FTP through a web browser is the easiest way for your recipients to get access to files on your own PC. You just email them a link and they click on it.
    ~
8

Reducing the size of your photos is a good idea anyway just so that your recipients don’t have to wait for huge downloads, even if the files have been shared amongst several computers. There are tools to batch-shrink digital images so that you don’t have to go through the pain of doing them individually. One that I’ve used is the free version of Adobe Photoshop Album (you may additionally need to install Microsoft’s Data Access Components for it to work). You tell PS Album to attach the photos to email, but specify your hard drive as the destination instead of an email address.

In another thread here, someone had recommended Picasa, which appears to have similar functionality and is now free (Google bought them out), but I have not used it myself. It shares photos through something called Hello, which appears to work through chat programs.

9

Thanks for the tips and ideas. I especially like the batch digital image shrinking link Earthling.

In the course of my online research, I ran across this product that most closely meets my perceived needs (I’d prefer a longer text description ability, but this may be sufficient). The software cost $20 (for the host computer only; the people accessing the images don’t need to have any special software) but it’s pretty comprehensive – can display thumbnails, slide shows, and even videos and music. www.sharegear.com

I might try it out with the free trial offer.

10

I’d do what DougC suggests, it’s what I always do to transfer files between remote computers (unless I’ve got Timbuktu on both of them).

Nice to have the PC/Windows info on how to set up an FTP Server, I’m flagging this thread :).

On MacOS 9 (and before, dating back to System 6 I guess), the easy & free way is to nab a copy of NCSA Telnet, and configure the built-in FTP Server that it comes with. Another free app with the same feature is MacSSH PPC.

MacOS X has FTP Server built into the Sharing preferences pane, although you have to create an actual user account for each login name that will be used.