Multimedia Baby Publishing

May 16, 2009 5:27 AM

What's the best way to share short posts, videos and photos of our new baby with our families and friends who live an ocean away?

Baby's own account on Facebook? Our own accounts on Facebook? Flickr? Poorly put together Geocities page? What's worked for you?

posted by TrashyRambo to human relations (12 comments total)

An invite-only Blogger blog. My friends with babies use this.
posted by meerkatty at 5:32 AM on May 16

Or, Tumblr. Short-form posting makes it easier for everybody. Posterous is similar but it's easier because you just have to email your stuff in.
posted by drea at 5:34 AM on May 16

tumblr.com for the blog (will also host your photos), + vimeo.com for your videos. I have one set up for my son here, although I host my photos on my own website using Gallery.
posted by skwm at 5:45 AM on May 16

I use blogger for exactly this purpose. Works wonderfully.
posted by sundri at 5:46 AM on May 16

Blogger. Can be private or public, and super simple to use.
posted by fire&wings at 5:50 AM on May 16

Tumblr gets my vote for it's simplicity and ease of use, but Blogger is a good choice, too. I tried to think of other options but it boiled down to these two already mentioned.
posted by Orchestra at 5:56 AM on May 16

Facebook if folks are already there. Blogger, I suppose, if they are not, but you might find that folks who don't have Facebook accounts (unless it's some principled stand) are unlikely to check a blog, nevermind remember a blog password.
posted by bluedaisy at 6:17 AM on May 16

Blogger is really easy to use, it's what I set up for my brother/nephew.

But how about Picasa? You can easily upload both videos and pictures (sized to the web or not) to a Picasa web album (1G of free storage). It's super easy to use. Flickr also does this, and you can send out free guest passes to people via email, so they don't have to have a Flickr account to see pictures. Set it to friends and family only for privacy.
posted by gemmy at 6:55 AM on May 16

We use Picasa! It makes things so simple. You can upload both photos and videos and have pretty long captions to go with each. You can make the albums so that they won't show up in a public search, or you can password-protect them altogether. When you install picasa on your computer, it comes with really nice photo editing capabilities, and buttons where it's just one click to email, post to blogger, upload to Walgreens, etc. It also makes organizing photos on your hard drive a snap.
posted by Ostara at 9:14 AM on May 16

My brothers family use mostly his wife's account on facebook - her family is in France, his family is in Australia, they live in the States. The kids don't have accounts and don't get tagged in photos, but that's probably for the best, with all the embarrassing bathtime and food-chaos photos up there. All the photos are friends only, and some of them are individual-person only. My mother doesn't have a facebook account, but checks it out through one of us.
posted by jacalata at 10:49 AM on May 16

We use Flickr, but our family abroad is not always savvy enough to know how to register, so our account is actually publicly viewable. We like Flickr because you can allow users to access the full size of your pictures if they want to print them. The down side is that in the past three years we've learnt of four instances where our photos were used on other people's blogs without permission, with made-up names and stories. One of them kept it up for almost two years and duped a whole host of readers. We later found out it was run by a bored 17-year old girl in France.

We've removed identifying information but the fact is if your photos are in any way interesting someone could use them elsewhere.

It doesn't freak us out so we haven't made them private.
posted by Dragonness at 10:57 AM on May 16

totspot.com
posted by annabkr at 11:07 AM on May 21