How can I share my walking photos privately?

Q

I’m part of a small group of robust men in their 70s who take regular walks in the countryside, followed by long pub lunches with a couple of pints. I’m the photographer of the group and would like to set up a website that my pals can access to see what happened each week. I don’t want a public following of any kind; I want to limit it to our small closed group. What do you suggest? Roger Taylor

A

The four main options are Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and Google Photos. You can probably rule out Instagram, which is geared to the instant sharing of photos in a public timeline. Facebook has photo albums, and you can control who sees them (up to a point), but only if everyone you want to share them with has their own Facebook account. If not, you’ll need to make an album public.

Flickr and Google Photos are better options. Both offer free accounts; both let you upload huge numbers of photos at the original or reduced resolution; and both let you mark photos as private so they won’t be visible to the public. The photos appear in a timeline with the newest first, but you can put them into albums – one for each walk, for example.

In both services, you can create a shareable link to an album (a URL people can click), and email it to everyone who needs access (see screenshot). Only people with this link will be able to see the photos. They also let you share videos if you ever shoot those.

Flickr is owned by Yahoo, so if you already have a Yahoo email address you can log in and start using it. Similarly, a free Google account gives you 15GB of storage, which includes Google Photos. We’d suggest uploading a batch of photos to each service, then playing around with the options to see which one you prefer.