This image is hidden for guests. Please login or register to see it. With our family scattered between Texas and Massachusetts, I am always on the lookout for ways to share photos and videos with cousins and grandparents half a continent away. I am mindful of security, particularly if I am sharing or sending photos of other people's kids. I've got a Flikr account, and I've used passworded YouTube vids to share as well, but I've pretty much settled on using Apple's .Mac system to create photo and video sharing pages. The system allows me to create and update galleries pretty easily, allows for security settings and passwords, then generates cool looking announcement emails.

What do you use to share photos with other family members?

Man I wish it was that easy for pc users. We had a family reunion recently and as part of it we had several skits and movies made. Some of the movies were over 100MB so I couldn't use many of the "free" storage options. Plus some of my family members didn’t want the pics or movies on the net at all so I ended up using rapidshare to store the encrypted zip files and giving everyone detailed instructions on how to pull the files down. Total pain in the ass but little change of anyone else had access to the files. Next time I will just burn a disk and send it by carrier pigeon to them. That would have been easier.

LOL. I will refrain from snarky, mac guy commentary. The privacy concern is always a tough one. I always take private and password protect everything that has pictures of anyone not in my immediate family.

Well, since Facebook now allows video uploads, that is the obvious choice for sharing both photos and videos amongst our friends and family.

Not only is it very easy for family members to view these videos on nearly any computer, but it provides fine-grained privacy controls. That's something that YouTube just doesn't offer.

Excellent point. If you do some homework on how to manage friends and privacy, Facebook can be a great family platform. We finally have all the grandparents on FB.

I'm supposed to be sharing photos and videos of TheBoy? Hmmm... I should get on that...

Facebook seems to be a good answer if everyone is on it, and you dig through to find the privacy controls.

I have a business photo account that also allows for private galleries. Whenever I get to uploading more photos of the lil bugger, I will likely use it. (www.smugmug.com is the host company) It's not a free site (by any stretch) but it has privacy settings, and uploading is fairly simple. And you can order reasonably priced prints if you have a photo you really like. It gives you lots of control over all of the downloading, viewing, linking, and pricing of photos if you get the pro account. But much of it wouldn't apply in a family situation. But it's available to me already, so I should take advantage of it...

This is a topic that is on my mind all the time. I loved facebook but I was always weary of the privacy. I have my own family site that I created using a Joomla which is an open source ($Free) CMS (Content Management System) application. Many hosting companies will install it and update security patches automatically. This is nice for a blog style webpage for our family to share but I'm currently working on a site that will use vBulletin Suite which will include photo gallery, blog, forum, groups and a CMS homepage for articles. It costs but at least I can manage the users (my family and friends) and they can manage their own content over the galleries and blogs etc.

Since I have my wife family in the Netherlands. My family is in the USA, Estonia, and Japan. So this is a real problem for us to communicate.

We use FaceBook but have 2 accounts.

The first account is for family and close friends. Has photos, video used for family etc.. but the account has all the privacy settings turned on.

The second account is for everything else like friends, work, fans (like Dad labs) and apps.

This works rather well.

I use a combo of picasa3 and family site on wordpress linking to my picasa galery pages.

Picasa3 is free gives me a chance to manage the jumbled mess that is my pictures on the home hard drive and share them to web albums.

Then I just embed slideshow link to my family web site and bob's your uncle.

But one day i will actually go through all the photos on our hard drive and sort them out into albums... one day.

We're going to check out picasa. Thanks for the tip.

An interesting item regarding photography sharing...

First, you need to have a www.SmugMug.com account. ($40 to $150 per year) $40 for the standard account, the $150 is for "pro" photogs who use the site to sell stuff. The standard account is plenty for storage and sharing. But if you're heavy into photography, you probably know about smugmug.

Second, you need a Roku. Roku is a small box that works with Netflix "instant watch" and Amazon "on demand". I believe DaddyTroy has discussed this DVR type device.

So anyway... you can view SmugMug galleries with the Roku. Also, there are apparently some 'learning' channels on the Roku as well (for Photoshop).

Here is where I originally heard about this:
www.aplanding.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4351

I have a SmugMug site but not a Roku. Just thought it was a pretty cool idea. I've been considering a DVR of some sort, but our highspeed (cable) internet is a must for me, and that's through the cable television provider. So I'm not sure ditchin' cable TV, keepin' the internet service yet going to a Roku, would really save us anything. But that's a completely different discussion. Still haven't ponied up for the cable DVR yet.

I use gallery.me.com from apple. They do charge you $99 for the whole mobile me service. You can publish some nice albums out. Also they make it easy to publish from (iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture, iWeb)

I use Facebook for a larger audience with limited picture set. But for family I like using gallery.

Some folks I now always post on kodak or walgreens and it frustrates me since I cannot download the pix and end up having to do screen grabs.

I use mobile me by mac and it syncs with my iphoto.

I will have to agree with picasa. Although the web version only gives you 1 gig of storage of the photos so that means some photos will eventually have to come down.

I am experimenting with shutterfly but don't have enough information to give a quality review of it yet.