Sharing Photos Online
My cousin in Scotland is the most recent person to send me an email saying “I’m going to try to get the family pictures on the web like yours soon.” He might be feeling inspired by my 77 year old father who finally succeeded this year in posting travel photos on Flickr, but like so many others had delayed for years before diving in. With so many ways to share photos available, choosing the right method and service at a reasonable cost is daunting. This guide will help you figure out where to start by following these three steps:
1. What do you really want?
When we put our first photos online, we automatically used an old website we had because it was free and it was what we were used to. We didn’t even consider that there were other options available to us. Today, there are several classes of photo sharing sites, many of them with impressive free options. So before you can pick a site you need some idea of the type of site that’s best. Answering these three main questions should get you to the right type of site:How will my photos be used?
My cousin referred to our site, and you might also have a site in mind that you’d like to copy. Before you get too set on that, though, it pays to spend some time thinking about how your online photos will be used before choosing a method. Our site might not be the best model since we have a pro level photographer in the family who hopes eventually to sell photos online. Having that in mind, our set up is a bit more complicated than my cousin might need. The site you admire could be lacking basic features that are important to you.
So what are some of the ways photos can be used? It helps to think about this compared to typical offline uses:
Photo Album- you plan to pass them around to friends and family like your latest pack of prints
Doubleprints- you want to simplify sending the grandparents copies of the latest antics of the grandkids
Slideshow- you hope to present them in order with a narrative like a slideshow
Art Show- you’re a bit of a whiz with the camera, if you do say so yourself, and you want to share the gems with your friends and family
Gallery- you’re reaching pro level and want to display high quality images for viewing by total strangers, hoping to get some feedback and/or sales
Illustration- you’d like to use your images to illustrate articles or stories, like here on BrewZone
Hobbyist- you have hundreds of photos to share and discuss with other enthusiasts of your prize Pomeranian or your model train collection
You might have one or more purposes in mind. To pick the right method, you’ll want to prioritize and be very clear on what’s a necessary feature and what would just be nice to have. In this process, you might discover that you want to handle some pictures one way and others differently, so there’s no reason you can’t split them into different projects and post them using different methods.
Whether you are using a film camera or a digital, you have probably been either sharing prints or emailing. These photos are privately owned by you and typically shared specifically with whomever you chose, but once you go on the web you have to consider many new ways in which they can become public. It becomes much easier to intentionally or accidentally share them with complete strangers. Consider whether you want them to be public, or whether you want to keep them as private as possible. How do you feel about personal privacy, and also the intellectual property of your images? Will all of the pictures be public or private or a mix?
Once you’ve sorted out those decisions, it will be a lot easier to pick the right posting method.
How much money am I going to spend?
Another element to sort out right away is how much you are willing to spend. You will have options ranging from free all the way up to hundreds of dollars per year. Many of the free sites have one or more upgrade options for more storage or more features. If you currently spend about $20/month on prints, are you hoping to eliminate that cost or to apply that amount to posting online? Keep in mind that many online options have ongoing costs, so unlike the one-time cost of printing, you might have to pay month after month to maintain old pictures you keep online.
The costs of a photo site depend on several factors. One will be the features offered, so you might be charged for more convenience or for more choices. For example, many free sites display ads on your pages, but might offer an ad-free upgrade. Another cost factor is storage space, and the amount of space you will need will be based on the number of photos you share and the quality of the images, as well as how long you want to keep them posted. A free site like Flikr might let you keep the equivalent several packs of 4 x 6 prints. Having dozens of top quality images ready for sale on SmugMug can be $150/year or more. Posting all your travel slideshows from the past ten years might cost more than you expect. And while most photo sites these days allow unlimited traffic for people viewing your photos, you could have to pay for high viewership if you display them on your own website.
The good news is that once you know the features you are looking for, you will only pay for what you really need.
How much time am I going to spend?
The third factor in picking the right site is complexity. We each have different levels of technical confidence and competence. Some people are able to build a whole website devoted to their pictures, while others are really hoping to find a one-click solution. Even if you are pretty tech savvy, you still might only have an hour a month or so to devote to posting your photos. Some methods will take a bit of time to set up, but then very little time to maintain. Others will go up in a flash, but then might require regular maintenance to keep storage costs down. As you consider the various options available, assess how much time you think it will take you to learn and how much to maintain. Be realistic about how much time you really want to spend on this each time you post pictures, and on a monthly basis.
Also, it’s important to be aware that posting photos online can be a little like scrapbooking. Know that when you look at someone’s really nifty photo page, they might have put a considerable amount of time into captioning, commenting and designing the page. If you’ve never actually arranged your prints into an album because you never had the time, you probably won’t suddenly start cropping and captioning each photo just because it’s online. You don’t want to select a posting method that’s so time consuming that you end up never posting, or that charges for cool extras you will never use.
This article was written on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 and is filed under Mastering Skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on July 28, 2008 at 12:13 am Jim Grau wrote:
Okay, then. I think Flickr meets my needs, but am a bit confused about my ability to upload photos as far as the number and the amount of GB’s I can use in any one month or time period. If I want to upload pics of all of my trips and then maybe scan hundreds of our family photos -starting way back in the 1800’s to the present- is this a good way to go? I can scan the old photos and group them by sides of the family (with captions of who they are.) Would this work with the “unlimited” feature of Flickr? I would refer family and close friends to the Flickr site that I now have. As I understand it, I could upload an unlimited amount pics in albums as I choose and just pay the annual fee. Am I right or am I off base? Is there a better way to go? Thanks!
on August 23, 2008 at 8:08 pm BeeZed wrote:
If you are already on Flickr and willing to pay the small annual fee, it looks like it would be the easiest solution for you. We have a friend who keeps one Flickr account just for old family albums exactly as you describe. You can keep unlimited sets (like albums) and have unlimited uploads and storage if you upgrade your account. Each set can have unlimited pictures within it as well.
you do that here: (Three months free at the moment)
Flickr upgrade
the sales pitch is here:
Flickr Benefits
All your current stuff will still be there. (Even old stuff that might have disappeared if you put too many pics in your free account will be there.)
And one more thing- if there are things you want only the family to see, you can set albums or images with their comments to private and send out guest passes so only family can see them without having to sign up at all.
Have fun setting them up!