Photo Gallery site - PLUS

September 16, 2008 12:12 PM

I'm looking for a site that will let me send email or SMS to online galleries with photos, videos or audio.

I am planning on a photo/video/audio scavenger hunt at a convention in May. (yay, time to plan and test the solution!)

I want each team to have a separate email address to send their entries to. I want each email address to go to a separate stream or gallery. Ease of downloading the entire stream/gallery is important since in the end we'll download the winning stream and post those messages, somewhere. (on the wall, on a dvd running a slide show... something)

Of course, I have no budget. This is a non-profit convention (Science Fiction convention, if you're curious)

Since I don't know how many teams there will be, or how many things there will be on the list (we just started working on that part) unlimited storage is pretty important.

I expect no 'adult' images, but I can't control what pictures other people take, so I need a site that won't go nuts if a little skin slips in. deleting the offending photo is fine. killing the account and all the photos is not.

So... Hive Mind, help? What's your best low-cost or free email-sensitive photo/audio/video sharing site?

posted by davereed to computers & internet (6 comments total)

have each team create a flickr account and make it so that everything they post using the particular email address flickr assigns them is tagged nameofyourscavengerhunt, so you can see them pretty much as they go up. easy peasy and free. flickr only does photo and short video, but it should be good enough for your purposes as you can fold audio into video. if you have to do video longer than 90 seconds, i have a slightly more complicated but still easy and free way to wrangle everything.
posted by lia at 12:50 PM on September 16, 2008 [1 favorite]

Seconding flickr. Each account gets a unique email address to email photos to.
posted by Joh at 4:43 PM on September 16, 2008 [1 favorite]

OK, flickr will work, but will flikr let me create a whole bunch of accounts? somewhere between 2 and 20, probably?
posted by davereed at 7:02 AM on September 18, 2008

yes, although it'll take a bit of work—you have to create one yahoo/flickr account per team.
posted by lia at 1:21 PM on September 18, 2008

Suggestion - before the scavenger hunt begins, but after all your teams are assembled, have each team take a photo of themselves and email it to their flickr account. This serves as an easy tech test, ensuring things should run smoothly mid-game (you really don't want to be debugging email problems during the race!), and secondly it easily allows viewers to identify which team is which, and who each set of photos belong to. Sounds fun, good luck!
posted by Joh at 9:16 AM on September 19, 2008

Photos Your Way is a photo sharing website that may be of interest to you. It is completely free. A basic account will provide each user/in your case team, with 7GB of storage. You can be upgraded to unlimited storage, if you opt to make just one of your photos available for sale.

If you are worried about the content of some photos that may contain a little skin slippage, just make them private.

Additionally, since you mentioned budget - when your team members sign up for accounts, you can make money for your non profit. They have a program in which non profit organizations earn money by referring friends and family. The non-profit organization earns $1 for each person who registers and upload photos. Here is a link to check it out.

http://photosyourway.com/non_profit_request.aspx

I'm not sure if this site is exactly what you're looking for, but might be worth your time to check it out.
posted by DKNB at 2:01 PM on October 6, 2008