Sharing Photos with Friends & Family

[Suninfrance]

For a long time now, I have been trying to find a way of sharing my photos with friends and family back in England, in a nice format, without having to create my own website.   Then my cousin introduced me to Phanfare.  She has been using it for years for her photos and videos on MSN, but Phanfare have recently made their site more accessible.

After I got the invite to view my cousin's albums, I thought I'd have a go at it myself and joined up.  The best thing about it, is you don't pay anything unless you have more than 1GB worth of photos to display.  Videos take up more room, but it's surprising how many photos you can get for 1GB, especially if you downsize them to say 8 x 6 for the site.

What you do is download the software from Phanfare (I will warn you, it does take quite a while even on broadband, but I thought it was worth it).

Once the software is downloaded, you create albums.  So far I have Places to Go, Friends, Cats, Our House (Before and After), Winter in Correze, Family History, etc and I'm not even halfway through my 1GB yet.  You can use backgrounds for the photos and once the album is complete, you can give the photos captions and set them up as a slide show with background music.  There are some soundtracks that come with the software, but you can, through Windows Media Player, use your own downloaded music as the background music.  You can time your slide shows as well which allows you to decide how long each photo is displayed for.

Once you've done that, you send invitations to your friends and family e-mails with a short message.  They don't have to download anything at their end (unless they want to use the programme themselves).  All they have to do when they receive the invite (which will be from Phanfare rather than your e-mail address), is to click on the "View Albums" button, and then they, and only those you wish to see them, have access to all your photos in your slide show.

They can also make comments on the slide show for you to read.

Your pictures are not in the public domain - only those you choose to send invites too - and you can set the album so that all photos are copyright protected.  Your friends and family, can however, order prints if they choose to.

The website is www.phanfare.com

Jan

[Russethouse]

I use Kodak - Kodak.co.uk.

[Suze01]

I use Kodak, Orange and Photobucket, and for my artistic stuff Redbubble. All free and you can set the albums to public or private as suits.

[Pierre ZFP]

Picassa - then you're not limited to a measley 1Gb or to the size of the file for the photo.  If it's good enough for NASA then it's OK for me too. Mine pictures are around 3Mb each in JPG or nearly 10Mb in RAW, can't upload them in Photobucket.

[cooperlola]

I have a Flikr pro' account which - yes - cost $24 a year, but it has unlimited storage facilities.  Nice to know that my pics are backed up somewhere else (you can make any pics private, so only you can see them, if you wish, or limit who can see them) in case of major disasters.