My cousin was pretty excited to get a new digital camera for Christmas. So excited, she immediately started taking pictures specifically to send to Aunt Martha – the one who gifted her the camera. She had hundreds of pictures of all of her relatives (including me) from this area, and she wanted to send them all back to Aunt Martha in Kalamazoo.
Rather than pick a handful to e-mail, she decided to send the whole bunch. Of course, there were too many attachments and the e-mail ended in an error message. After being stopped dead in her tracks, she decided to try some online picture services.
Her first attempts were Flickr.com, Webshots.com, Shutterfly.com and Photobucket.com. These are the most common photo sharing websites on the internet. What my cousin didn’t know is that none of these sites are private. Anyone with an internet browser has access to all of her personal pictures.
After a week or so I received an e-mail from her telling me that she was contacted by people she doesn’t know who are commenting on her pictures. I figured before I give her any suggestions I’d ask if Martha had seen them. “No,” she replied, “she had a difficult time finding them.” At this point I realized exactly what was happening.
Photo sharing websites are meant to show off pictures and they are a wonderful method of showcasing your favorites for the world to see. They are typically not private and should never be considered a clandestine place to stash your valuable memories. As I said earlier, photos on these sites are able to be seen by anyone with internet access.
So now the dilemma is how to get more than a hundred pictures to Aunt Martha without anyone seeing them; except for Aunt Martha. When I asked her why photo sharing sites weren’t her first choice she told me there are pictures of her new baby that she didn’t want the world to see. “Good enough,” I thought and did a little research.
I remembered seeing a “photos” option within Gmail so I did a little more research. I first thought of Gmail because I found a private collaborative file sharing application that lets people confidentially view and edit documents from their Gmail account. It’s private, so they must have a privacy option for their images.
Aunt Martha and my cousin needed a Gmail account for this to work. In addition, anyone who my cousin wanted to share her scads of pictures with also needed an account. Gmail accounts are free so signing up is a simple matter of inviting friends from other e-mail providers to Gmail. It’s probably the easiest e-mail provider to sign on with.
Once signed in with a Gmail account, anyone has access to Picasa, Gmail’s photo sharing app. Picasa lets users share pictures with the world or privately between Gmail account holders. In fact, users of Picasa can also edit pictures online and perform basic modifications to them. One of the nicest features of Picasa is that it doesn’t share private moments with the world.
Since setting up my cousin with Picasa, she has uploaded thousands of pictures to their service. She has the option of setting permissions as to who can view her pictures. My cousin can rest assured that strangers in Baltimore and Denver cannot see her pictures and only Aunt Martha in Kalamazoo can see pictures of her baby.
Some people may not mind having their personal pictures scattered randomly on the net. For those people general file sharing applications are satisfactory. For the rest of us who enjoy modesty, Picasa is a great way to share pictures.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can e-mail him at remoquin@gmail.com or call him directly at (978) 919-8059.)