Share your amazing photos by using the cloud
From Facebook and Instagram to more-private online services
In a previous column I wrote about solutions to the big problem of sharing digital photos via email. Snapshots taken with modern smartphones and digital cameras can each range from three megabytes to over seven megs and emailing several at once is not practical, especially if the recipient is receiving them on a smartphone and has a small data limit.
I discussed various solutions to the email problem and they all involved shrinking the resolution of each photo so that its file size would be a tenth of the original. Things get more complicated if you need to share dozens of photos of a wedding or an event, or each email recipient wants different pictures than someone else. If this dilemma sounds familiar, then it’s time to turn to the cloud.
Simply put, cloud storage is uploading and saving photos to a gigantic computer owned by a large company and accessible via the internet. Your photos are password protected from viewing or tampering but people with an invitation from you can visit the cloud storage to view and download the photos.
Facebook and Instagram are two ways of displaying your photos in the cloud to be viewed and downloaded. A nice touch is that you can add comments to each photo. But one immediate issue is the people you’re sharing the photos with have to be Facebook or Instagram members, which is not always the case. Also, Facebook and Instagram drastically reduce the resolution of uploaded photos and any downloads will not equal the quality of the originals.
That’s why you should consider a cloud storage provider which is in the business of handling large files and sharing them. The major players in the cloud are Google Photos (https://photos.google.com) which is part of Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive (https://onedrive.live.com), Apple iCloud (https://www.icloud.com), and Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/).
All these cloud services provide essentially the same services but Google Photos is notable because its free storage limit is a huge 15 gigabytes, or enough space for thousands of photographs. The photos are saved in the original resolution and file size but if you allow Google to reduce the file size of each photo there is no limit to the number of snapshots you can upload.
I’ve previously discussed using cloud storage to back up valuable files and documents but cloud storage of photos has unique features. People can be given rights to only view certain albums or permission to add their photos to your album, and no one needs to have an account. Google Photos has nifty tools and filters for doing basic editing and enhancing badly framed or exposed pictures.
Each cloud service has an app available for a computer, smartphone, or tablet which will automatically sync all of the photos or files in specific folders on your device. But if you want to skip the hassle of downloading and setting up an app then you can sign up for a free account, create a few photo albums, and directly upload the photos to the cloud by using the Upload button at the website.
There are various ways to share your photos with one or tens of people when you click on the share button, which often looks like a letter “v” lying sideways with three balls attached. I’m not sure why the share button can’t just say “share” or something direct.
You can send an email invitation which will include a link that the recipient can tap or click on to be taken directly to your shared album, or generate a post directly to Facebook or Twitter with the link included. You can also just create a link that you can cut and paste into an email or post to a social media site. The important thing to remember is that anyone who has the link can view the photos so be careful where you post or send the link, and make some adjustments in the settings to restrict editing to only trusted friends to prevent anyone deleting some of your favourite pictures.