Where to upload all our party photos?

March 3, 2008 8:24 AM

Looking for a photo-sharing website where a closed group of people can all share and upload photos to a given gallery. Bonus points if no registration is required, and if it allows for big photo sizes.

I'm looking for a photo sharing website of the kind that would allow me to create a gallery of photos, share this gallery with a closed group of people, and also allow members of this closed group to upload photos to the gallery, so there is one central place for everyone's photos.

I understand that there are a billion photo sharing sites out there that allow this amongst registered users. I would ideally like to do this without a registration step, in some slick, Grandma-friendly interface. Perhaps access can be controlled by a unique URL?

(If Picasa can do this, I have failed to figure out how.)

posted by Brian James to technology (12 comments total)

Picasa can do it. And do it well.

Just click on Web Album button located at the bottom of the Picasa interface and it will allow you to upload the selected album online.

Easy. All you need is to be registered on gmail.

Simple. Effective and Gradma-friendly. ;)
posted by iceman7 at 8:34 AM on March 3

I am not sure this exists. How can you have a website that is closed, but doesn't require registration? To keep a website private, then you have to issue one or more accounts, and to create those accounts require... registering.

You could register a catch-all that Uncle and Grandma can use to upload their photos.
posted by Monday at 8:35 AM on March 3

My thinking is that access to this gallery could be restricted by simply having some unique URL that is not publicly listed anywhere. I share it with the attendees, they visit it and upload photos. No logging in or registration.

I also want to allow any visitor to that gallery to upload photos. (And I will restrict access to the URL)
posted by Brian James at 8:39 AM on March 3

Is Grandma capable of emailing photos? (Not trying to be snarky - my own grandmother has tons of trouble attaching files.) Flickr lets you upload photos by sending them to an email address, and it keeps your default privacy level, unless you amend the email address. Also, why not have a common login and password, so no one has to register except you?
posted by desjardins at 8:42 AM on March 3

Oh, no logging in, even? I think you are risking trouble. How do you know none of the people in the group will ever post the URL, even accidentally or innocently? You don't have a younger relative that might link a photo to his/her MySpace page, get in a tiff with someone else, and that someone harasses your group?
posted by desjardins at 8:47 AM on March 3

Flickr. She can do a super-simple sign up and be added to the private photo pool, and heck, she can even email photos to it if she's got attachments down to simplify the process. It's one thing that Flickr does extremely well. Otherwise, as somebody earlier said, just use a single sign-on that is shared and have the photos set to unshared.
posted by cgomez at 8:48 AM on March 3

desjardins: good point, I recognize there is an element of insecurity in this approach. It need not be open for all time--just long enough to allow some attendees to post their photos, after which it might get locked up. (after say a week or two)
posted by Brian James at 9:00 AM on March 3

"My thinking is that access to this gallery could be restricted by simply having some unique URL that is not publicly listed anywhere."

It's Google Web Albums that you are looking for. You can use Picasa to manage the Album.
It's not really private, but every private album has it's own cryptic url (that's hard for other to figure out) that you can send others.

No registration required to view, not even a gmail login.
posted by WizKid at 9:33 AM on March 3

Do Picasa web albums allow multiple people to contribute to a single album? I didn't think they did.
posted by Good Brain at 10:04 AM on March 3

Tabblo has group photo albums where others can contribute to an online gallery by e-mailing pictures to an e-mail address associated with that tabblo, but it doesn't appear that they have continued to support that feature anymore. Sorry. :(
posted by parilous at 1:24 PM on March 3

check out our new website at fo2go.com. lets you upload from camera phone after you create free account. also has online upload function, but it's slow - we're working on that :). cool thing (imho) i've not seen anywhere else is you can create contacts or tags and even groups of contacts on the website. when you run the app on your phone it downloads info from your account so you can pick tags and contact/group from a menu, and that gets automatically assigned to every picture you upload (until you change them). can take multiple pictures and they all get uploaded to site with tags and everybody in the group will get an email with link for viewing. easy... once you get the initial account set up and get permissions set on your phone, and it lets you set default for uploads to be public or private, or change by picture later...
posted by gooba at 8:05 PM on March 4 [1 favorite]

You may want to check out box.net

Their free account provides 1gb of storage - users could log in and upload photos to a central spot. If you dig around further you may find that this provides what you need, and may let you enable uploads to users without an account.

They've just added a collaborators feature, but I'm not certain if/how it functions with a free account.

I would dig in further myself but I was an early signup, so I have a 'grandfathered' 5gb free account with some extra features.
posted by 3rdparty at 6:20 AM on March 6