Photo sharing thoughts

I just returned from my mother's birthday party with about 300 photos - I would say 70% of them are no good, so I selected about 40 of the best ones and then had to decide how to share them with everyone who cared.

A little bit of research produced the following options which I am sharing with YOU to save you and me some time in the future.

Note that I am on a Mac and thus I use iPhoto to store the pictures, and have an Apple MobileMe account.

  • Option 1: Create a MobileMe Gallery directly from iPhoto and upload the pictures. This works well but the gallery has many clever features which may confuse some of the inexperienced computer users who want to see the pictures.

  • Option 2: Send to FaceBook directly from iPhoto. This also works well. Because most (but not all) of the people who would like to see the photos are my friends on Facebook they will immediately see the photos and I don't have to send them emails. Also there are many friends on facebook who I would normally not bother with an email announcement but who will appreciate seeing the photos. On the other hand, once the album 'scrolls' off their feed in facebook they will probably have a hard time finding it.

  • Option 3: I am experimenting with a very simple and free site called Yogile which offers a brain dead simple viewer experience. Drawback is that I cannot send the photos directly from iPhoto, but on the other hand it gives an easy URL which I can email to everyone who might be interested.

  • Option 4: I considered Flickr, which I love. But I often find that people who don't know it or are very inexperienced with computers oddly get quite confused because again it has many many features.

Any other that I should consider?