Uploading photos to Facebook for the computer unsavvy

June 9, 2014 3:56 PM

My dad is a HUGE fan of Facebook. However he's not hugely competent with computers. He's now asking how he can upload photos from his most recent holidays for his friends to see. There are over a thousand photos in the album. How can we streamline this?

My usual workflow is to have all of my photos in one folder, then a small selection in a subfolder to upload to Facebook using their create album tool. I have tried introducing this to my dad, but multiple files in multiple locations confuses him.

Is there a better way? I am hoping that there is something that streamlines the process of creating an album and selecting photos to go in that album, without having to go through too many different windows. Extra points for something with a VERY COMPREHENSIVE manual. He is using Windows 8, if that helps.

Thanks.

posted by roshy to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

The easiest way I found for my dad was to have him email the photos to Facebook. Google for "How do I find my post by email address?"
posted by bleep at 4:37 PM on June 9, 2014

It might be best to upload one or two of the best photos to Facebook, then upload the rest of them to a photo sharing site such as Flickr, Snapfish, Imgur, SmugMug or one of the many other ones and put a link to it in the post. Just make sure the photo site doesn't require a viewer to register to see your dad's photos.
posted by IpsoFacto at 5:45 PM on June 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

I was going to suggest Flickr. With a link on Facebook.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 5:52 PM on June 9, 2014

Uploading 1000 photos is going to take a bit of babysitting, no matter what method he uses - with that large a number, the possibility of the connection dropping or the browser/app freezing increases. Also, just because Facebook *will* let you put up to 1000 images in an album doesn't mean anybody's going to look through them all. And their album management process is awful.

On preview, I agree with uploading the whole collection to Flickr, and the best couple of dozen, max, to Facebook, as a decent compromise. If you put them on Flickr, you can use the Guest Pass feature to keep the images at least somewhat non-public while not requiring his friends to get logins for Yet Another Web Site. And Flickr's interface for sorting pictures into Flickr albums is much better than Facebook's.
posted by Pandora Kouti at 6:20 PM on June 9, 2014

We break our vacation photos up into albums by day. London - Day 1, London - Day 2, etc. We only pick the best ones, but there are still some days that have around 100 photos. Makes it somewhat easier to edit, because you're kind of telling a story about that day and you tend to pick out only the high points. And also makes it easier for friends to see and appreciate.
posted by raisingsand at 6:44 PM on June 9, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far. I would like to clarify that we don't actually want to put 1000 photos up. He just has a thousand photos to sort through, the highlights of which he want to share. I normally make another folder with copies of the photos, and delete the ones we don't want, but this takes hours and overwhelms him. I don't live at home and can't afford to spend 5 hours sitting next to him while he pores over every photo, and then panics because he's deleted the original. I have tried, we both end up cranky. And then uploading to facebook is another level entirely-- he can manage to get the create album dialogue open but navigating to the right location and then selecting photos individually is tedious. I am of course happy to do this for him but am not there every day and think it's a shame he has to wait a week every time to share these photos he's really excited about.
I guess what I am looking for something that cuts out some of the steps. Something that he can use to upload from within the explorer window would be perfect. I hear you about Flickr, that's my site of choice as well, but all of his friends are on facebook and he loves the 'likes'. :)
posted by roshy at 8:27 PM on June 9, 2014

In addition to posting by email that I mentioned above it might help to remove the idea of putting different pictures in different albums if that's the cause of the frustration. I don't think other people notice or care what album something's in when it comes up in their feed.
posted by bleep at 8:35 PM on June 9, 2014

iPhoto and Aperture on the Mac let you push photos up to Flickr and Facebook from the application, and in Aperture, you can set it up to sync an album in your project to Facebook. That way, you just put all the photos you want to upload to Facebook in the album and push the whole album up. You should probably be able to do something similar in iPhoto.

Googling says Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you do something similar if you are on Windows. The only other popular Windows app is Picasa, but that's all Google+ integrated, which is great if you want to share your photos with the many Google engineers on G+.
posted by tommorris at 11:32 PM on June 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Picasa will let him look through them and star the ones he likes, hopefully that easy enough for him to do without you there. You could install it for him and even get the pictures into an album. All he would need to do is star the ones he likes.
Then, you can install the Upload to Facebook button, select just the starred ones from that album and hit the button. I think it will ask you to name the album and you can add a description if you want. Once they are uploaded (or as they are uploading) you can add captions as well. If he wants, he can add a comment instead of a caption to describe what is in the picture.
posted by soelo at 7:39 AM on June 10, 2014

*I have used Picasa to upload to Facebook and don't have a G+ account.
posted by soelo at 7:40 AM on June 10, 2014