Best photo hosting for organizing and sharing privately?

January 30, 2013 7:26 AM

I'm planning to scan a large number of old family photographs, with an eye to eventually creating family photobooks. I need a wide variety of my family members to be able to access these photos in order to comment on them, and tell me who is in them, when they are from, etc.

Ideally, they would be relatively private other than to members of my family. Not nuclear launch codes private, Flickr guest pass private would be fine.

Ideally, they would be able to see and comment on the photos without signing up for an account (blog style commenting, where they have to input a name and email address with the comment would be fine). Flickr lets them see without an account, but not comment, near as I can tell.

I'd like to be able to organize them and redownload them with the tags (and the comments, if that's not asking too much!) in the metadata.

Facebook is not an option, because several members of my family are determined Facebook holdouts.

I'm fairly well-versed in Flickr and have a Pro account and some mirroring software set-up, so my preference is to use that. But the lack of non-account commenting is a tripping point, because some of my relatives are not at all tech-savvy and a few of them are quite paranoid about signing up for things.

So, I'll use Flickr, unless there's a better option. I'm not averse to paying a moderate amount for that better option.

posted by jacquilynne to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Could you make a "jacquilynnefamilyflickraccount" and just send out the same username/pass to everyone? That way everyone can comment like this:

"Kyle looks like he's about 8 or 9 there, so I think that's probably from summer '88. Your uncle wasn't there because that was the year he was traveling to North Carolina so often. -Aunt Jo"

"No, I'm wearing my Ghostbusters 2 t-shirt, so it would have had to be summer '89 at least. -Kyle"

It works particularly well if you're saving the comments for posterity, because then your relatives' potentially embarrassing username choices (chadbrochill17) won't be saved for all eternity.
posted by phunniemee at 7:41 AM on January 30, 2013

SmugMug can do this.

I spent a lot of time looking into this kind of photo sharing and was close to rolling my own setup (with one of the existing open source PHP or Rails projects as the backbone). But, nothing I found had all the features I wanted. I don't love SmugMug (it's clunky and looks dated), but the family members I'm sharing photos with seem perfectly satisfied with it.

It's not free, but it's worth a look.
posted by jeffch at 7:59 AM on January 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

If exporting comments is important to you, check and make sure you can do this. When I last tried to export my mom's awesome commentary on our scanned family photos, I couldn't. But that was a couple of years ago, so there may be better tools available now. (If so, please come back and tell us! I keep meaning to investigate and see if this has changed more recently.)

With that caveat, Flickr worked well for this. If you've got anyone tech-savvy enough to look at the pictures online and use email but not to make an account, perhaps they could email comments that you could then add? A bit more work for you, but might be worthwhile to get the comments you'd otherwise lose.

I do recommend the semi-private road. I got a lot of creepy posts and follows from people who were unpleasantly interested in the little-kid pictures. I've since made pretty much all the childhood photos private and wish I'd never seen some of the comments people like to make on kids' photos on Flickr.
posted by Stacey at 8:17 AM on January 30, 2013

Response by poster: Well, I emailed SmugMug and they don't export comments. Nor does Flickr, that I can tell. I'm not overly surprised by that -- that's potentially a huge amount of Meta-data. I was just vaguely hopeful.

I can transfer the comments into descriptions and tags that do get exported, it's just more work on my part.

I think I may put the photos on my Flickr account, and then do as phunniemee suggested and create a second account that the people who don't have or want to create their own login can use to login and leave comments or tag things with.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:59 AM on January 30, 2013

Flicker and phunniemee's suggestion is what I used for exactly this. As a slight derail, it was helpful to upload the pictures in reverse chronological order (or roughly thereof) because it helped people remember tangential information ("No, that must not have been the '68 Grand Canyon trip, because here we are at what is definitely Lisa's high school graduation.")
posted by cocoagirl at 9:30 AM on January 30, 2013

I just installed Coppermine on my own hosting account for photo sharing. You can leave commenting open and then have a generic password that applies to all the albums. So they won't need an account, they'll just need to know what the password is. Also, for more tech savvy family members, you could give them an account and let upload photos. It's probably available on most hosting plans, but I know my provider has it as a one click install option. (gkg.net)
posted by COD at 5:02 PM on January 30, 2013