How to share large family photo collections: online galleries and more
When your 80-year-old mom loves a photo app, you know you’re onto something.
A while back, I packed up my car with empty photo boxes, post-its and photo pencils (tools of the trade) and headed to South Dakota for a long weekend to tackle my parent’s lifetime of photos and my childhood memories. My goal was to preserve the memories and share them with my sisters and brother. I wanted everyone to have digital copies of the pics because that’s the future, but I also wanted them to be able to interact with the photos and share them with their families in a meaningful way.
The first step was sorting, organizing and scanning them. To learn about how we did that, go HERE. Once I got them scanned, there were a few options for sharing that I considered:
A flashdrive loaded with the organized pictures. The nice thing about a flashdrive is that it is super easy to copy all of the pics onto it and give it to someone with a pretty bow on it. The downside is that flashdrives are easily lost, and unfortunately, easy to forget about.
An album. The beautiful thing about an album is that it is something you can touch and feel, and physically and emotionally experience by just picking it up. I’m a big fan of family albums that share a family’s history in a way that our younger generations can understand where they came from (Story of Us album). The downside…there is no way the 4,000 pics in this collection were going to fit into an album that anyone is going to look at.
A slideshow. I LOVE a well-done slideshow set to awesome music. I’m here for that. However, with 4000 pics at 3 seconds per slide, we would have had a slideshow that lasted well over 3 hours. Because I’m a fan of the slideshow, I highly recommend creating a “favorites” slideshow, but it’s not the perfect way to share a whole collection.
An online gallery. In our very digital world where everyone age 12 and up has a computer in their hands all day long, creating an online family gallery made sense. The plus side is that you can easily give access to everyone that you want to have access, and if you pick the right app, it can be a really beautiful viewing experience. The other cool thing is that other family members can download the pictures they want from the gallery, as well as add to it. There are a few cons. One is that older generations might not have the technical know-how or tools to access the gallery (but read on…). The second is that you need a family member to maintain the online site, as well as to keep a master copy outside of the app for backup, but you need that with the other options, too.
So here’s my story…There are several options for creating online family galleries. I chose to create an online family gallery in an app called SmugMug. I also really like a cloud service called pCloud (check out their lifetime plan, one-time payment, no annual fee). Both of these sites are trusted Cloud sites. They’re secure, they respect privacy, I knew that they wouldn’t mess with the quality of my photos by compressing them, and they have top-notch sharing and viewing capabilities. Do they cost money? Yes (but not a lot). Is it worth it to invest in sharing your family history? ABSOLUTELY!
Recently, my family gathered for the holidays. We live all over the country, from coast to coast. During our week together, I shared the gallery with my siblings, my parents, and some of the older grandkids. Everyone was able to access the photos via the app on their phone (they could also access it from their computers when they got home). Throughout the week, there wasn’t a day that someone wasn’t on the app looking through the photos. There was so much memory sharing and laughter, especially over our very cool clothing and hairstyle choices, which our children thought were hilarious.
And then…A few weeks later, I was on the phone with my parents, and my stepdad said how much my mom was looking at those ‘SlugBug’ pictures, which made me smile so big. Yes, my 80-year-old mom, who wasn’t very techy at all, could easily open the SmugMug app on her phone and look at her memories anytime she wants. I LOVE that we can make it that easy.
It made me so happy that these memories found their way out of my parent’s basement and back into our lives. Is it time to uncover your memories?
Having trouble choosing a photo organizing system or cloud service that you can stick to? With so many shiny options out there, it’s hard to know which one to choose. Take this FREE 3-QUESTION QUIZ for recommendations on where to store your photos, systems to manage your phone photos, and where to back up your memories.
Make it stand out
Holly Corbid is the Founder/Owner of Capture Your Photos, where we help you to organize, preserve, and share your lifetime of memories. Helping you touch hearts with your photos is our passion. We specialize in digital photo organization and work remotely with clients all over the country.
Holly is also the creator of The Photo Organizing Blueprint, an online course that provides a step-by-step guide to organizing your photos.
Find us at www.captureyourphotos.com or contact us here.