I just added a link at the top of this page to photos of Sam on Shutterfly. I’ve only managed to upload her pictures through September or so. That’s when I switched to Picasa, and I haven’t quite figured out yet how I’ll share those in an organized way.
Does anyone have a suggestion as to the fastest and easiest way to manage and share photos?
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I like what you’ve done with shutterfly. I wish I had good advice about online photo collections. My current method of online sharing with friends and family has hit its limit (for my personal purposes) and needs to change.
The age-range structure with event tags (or event based collections) is basically what I’ve done on my hard drive. Filing photos that way is easy and fast — just delete the rotten ones and drag and drop the keepers. I use a program called Thumbsplus on my hard drive to generate a keyword index and search for photos. (I have “just a few” photos, so an indexed search is a requirement, granted my index isn’t the most fastidiously maintained, but it works) The part I like about thumbsplus is specifically that it will generate index keywords from subdirectory tree names without me having to tag every image individually.
For photography-targeted photo sharing purpose, I’ve really liked flickr, but for the volume of photos you have, you’ll have to pay to get the “pro” account. (so far, I’m too cheap for that) They have searching, “family” category visibility, and comment and simple markup interfaces. Also a lot of tools for doing uploads and managing images on flickr.
Last I checked, snapfish was a bit like shutterfly. Snapfish is free for unlimited photos as long as you buy something from them once every 6 months or so. Probably very similar to shutterfly. Albums of photos.
If you want to control who can see your photos on a commercial service, generally folks will have to have a login on the system you are using. Not everyone will want to create accounts just to see your images. (such is with my family)
My way of sharing photos (drop me a private email and I’ll send you a link) isn’t very fast, nor all that easy. My only access control is obscurity. If you don’t have a URL, you’ll have a hard time getting to the images. If nothing else, I can show you how not to do it.
Anyone else have ideas?
rootie -
I am concerned about copyright on these photo sharing sites. I read an article that indicated some of the sites required that they retain copyright of any image you upload. Shutterfly was one of those sites, I believe.
Do you know anything about this?
I use (not so often now due to my busy schedule) babababies.com. They allow for the user to set a password and they do not retain copyright. But, the site is specifically for photos of your babes.
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I’ve used Picasa for some time now, and I’m very satisfied with it. I looked for a long time for a product that satisfied my needs, and even many “for purchase” products aren’t as good as Picasa IMO. My basic needs were/are:
1. Organize photos. Picasa is pretty good, though I didn’t require anything fancy; I just have them organized by the “default” mode of date. My camera software automatically downloads the raw photo files into subdirectories based on date, and Picasa is setup to look in the main directory and automatically import new pictures.
2. Resize photos for emailing. This was a big one that I surprisingly had a hard time finding. Picasa does this great, and can be setup to export these smaller photos to a different directory, to make it easier to find them for attaching to emails, etc.
3. Basic photo editing. I don’t know what I’m missing possibly, but Picasa satisfies my basic needs here – sharpening, color/contrast adjustments, and cropping are what I use.
4. Sharing via the web. Picasa gives you 2GB of space to setup your pictures for free; beyond that you have to pay (pretty sure it’s inexpensive, but I haven’t used the 2GB yet). You create web albums, probably similar to Shutterfly, and then you can arrange and comment your pictures. You can see what I’ve done at http://picasaweb.google.com/gregafree. There’s a serious lack of Ella pictures there, but that’s because we usually send pics via email (my official excuse, and I’m sticking to it!). -
Re: Lara’s copyright question.
The Shutterfly Terms & Conditions, Section 3, states:
“In the event that you post or upload to the Service, or otherwise submit to Shutterfly as part of your use of the Service, any materials including, without limitation, photographs and other images, text, graphics, sounds, data, links and other materials (collectively, “Submissions”), you will retain ownership of such Submissions, and you hereby grant us and our designees a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable (through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, perpetual, irrevocable right to use, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), create derivative works of, and publicly display and perform such Submissions, solely in connection with the Service. Except for the foregoing license, we do not claim ownership of any copyright in your Submissions. You represent, warrant and covenant that you own or otherwise possess all necessary rights with respect to your Submissions, and that your Submissions do not and will not infringe, misappropriate, use or disclose without authorization, or otherwise violate any intellectual property or proprietary right of any third party, and are not unlawful, fraudulent, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable.”
In plain English, you retain copyright, and by posting your photos, you are granting Shutterfly a license to post these photos on its website, as well as promising that you have the right to grant this license, i.e., the photos were taken by you or are owned by you.
The confusion might have resulted from Section 2, in which Shutterfly rightfully claims copyright in the materials it has created and made available on its website, such as logos, web designs, etc. But with respect to your own photos, I wouldn’t worry.
In fact, if Shutterfly was really trying to claim that postings of photos constituted a transfer of one’s copyright in the photos, I doubt that it would have lasted longer than a nano-second as a photo-posting website. Web-users are pretty savy about such things, and they would have promptly called out and stomped on such a policy by Shutterfly. Luckily, there’s no need, as Shutterfly has a sane copyright policy.
Just FYI, all of these websites have easily accessible User Agreements that spell out exactly what the company expects of the end-user (you) and what you can expect of the company.
Shutterfly’s user agreement is at:
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rootie, that’s a pretty smart way to generate tags. I never add them because it’s not worth the time when I can usually find what I want by date or quick thumbnail scan. But that’s because I don’t have all that many photos and in the past 2 years they’re pretty much all of the same subject.
I have a guess of what you do to share, but I need something FAST. FAST is key. Must be FAST. And EASY.I think I’m sticking with Picasa…I just need to spend a couple of hours getting set up with it. I agree with Greg’s points and would also add that I can organize on my computer and then upload with the same structure pretty seamlessly.
I’m going to stick with Shutterfly to print because I’ve heard their print quality is one of the best out there, and I’ve loved the products I’ve bought from them so far. I think I can buy prints from Shutterfly via Picasa, but haven’t tried that yet.
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