Where can we collect and share photos online without having to sign up?

Gabriel’s organisation works with community groups on volunteering, and they want to collect photos of all the various projects as simply as possible

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Once a year we hold a big day of international volunteering. Community groups, churches, synagogues and so on organise their own projects under our banner. We encourage them to take photos of their project and send them to us.

We would like to find a system that lets them upload photos easily, to a secure folder, without having to sign up for accounts or anything. We would then download the photos centrally, categorised by who uploaded them. DropEvent is the sort of thing we want, but it just gives us a big glut of photos without them being categorised into folders based on who uploaded them.

We are happy to do things that require some technical stuff from our end. Gabriel

DropEvent’s big idea is “everyone’s photos from your wedding in one place,” though it could equally be your Christmas party, school play, or whatever. Another attraction is that people can upload photos without having to sign up, though they still have to enter their email address.

DropEvent might fit your needs if each of your volunteer projects opened its own DropEvent gallery. Or perhaps you could create suitable galleries in advance, giving them all related names or numbers. A consistent naming scheme would enable one volunteer group to find photos from other groups, without mixing up their photos.

It should be easy to download the photos in batches: each DropEvent gallery has a button labelled “Download All Photos”.

Whichever service you choose, check whether the website keeps the original images or reduces their size – as Facebook does, for example. Services designed to display photos on the web usually shrink them, storing a screen-friendly 800 by 600-pixel (or similar) image and throwing away your 4,000 by 3,000-pixel original. This saves a lot of storage space and bandwidth, but it’s a disaster if you need originals for editing and/or printing.

Jeremy Noonan, DropEvent’s founder, says: “Originals are stored in the cloud and can be downloaded individually or all at once. Smaller sizes are made for fast display.”

Noonan adds that with “upgraded events, the incoming photos can be grouped by email address. It’s also possible to hide the gallery for the contributors when you want to collect photos but not share them.” The basic ad-supported service is free, but the Event Upgrade costs $5 per month, and there’s a $20 per month version “for groups who plan on having four or more events live at a time”.

Use existing services

Most people can already use photo sharing services, even if they don’t realise it. Facebook is the obvious example, and it does support collaborative albums. Facebook is easy to use, provides excellent tagging via face recognition, and you can control the privacy settings. However, as mentioned above, it doesn’t keep the original images, even if you upload them with the “high quality” setting.

The billions of people who have Microsoft (Hotmail, Live or Outlook.com), Yahoo or Gmail email addresses can also upload photos for you to download. In this case, Yahoo is the obvious option. A Yahoo email address/password provides access to Flickr, which has numerous photo sharing features, including RSS feeds. You don’t have to worry about storage because each account gets a free 1,000GB (ie a terabyte), and there is no longer a limit on downloading original images.

Flickr has a couple of drawbacks. The first is that permissions and settings can be confusing. The second is that, this year, Yahoo has restricted the desktop Auto-Uploadr program to Pro users who pay $50 a year.

Microsoft’s OneDrive also makes it easy to upload photos and share whole folders, the main drawback being that it has recently reduced the free storage allowance to 5GB. (You can upgrade to 50GB for $1.99 per month.) Some of your users may have Office 365 accounts, which includes a free terabyte of storage.

Google’s similar service isn’t as easy to use, but it does provide 15GB of free storage. In this case, the drawback is that the 15GB covers your email (of which I have 14GB), Gdrive files and original photos in Google Photos. If you run out of space, Google stores photos in reduced resolution versions. (You can upgrade to 100GB for $1.99 per month.)

But you don’t have to use existing accounts. It would be easy for someone from each of the projects to create a special projectname@service.com email address to share photos. Of course, not everyone would be able to see all the results. Also, you’d have the extra work of downloading photos from Flickr, OneDrive, Gdrive, Dropbox (an excellent service with a 2GB limit) or even imgur, rather than from a single source.

Alternatively, you could insist that every project uses Flickr. But you would have to provide online help documents and, perhaps, a screen-cap video to show them exactly what you want them to do.

Just zip it

Since you asked, I’d do it differently. I would get each project to submit a zipped (compressed) file of all their photos using either TransferBigFiles or WeTransfer. Both services let you send files up to 2GB in size without creating an account or signing in – which is the main feature want.

Both services are very easy to use, but TransferBigFiles is slightly easier, and unlike WeTransfer, it doesn’t require your email address. (Obviously, both services require the email address of the recipient, ie you.)

When a project uploads a collection of photos, the transfer service – either TransferBigFiles or WeTransfer – sends you a short email with a link to download the file.

The drawback with my system is that each project will need someone who knows how to compress a folder full of photos into a single file, because sending photos one at a time would drive everyone batty.

Decades ago, everybody knew how to zip everything, because an 88K floppy disk cost more than £1: storage space was expensive. Today, space is so cheap it’s usually free, and a lot of users have been so dumbed down by smartphones and tablets that they barely understand what a file is.

In Windows, you can compress a folder full of photos by right-clicking it, selecting “Send to” from the popup menu, and then selecting “Compressed (zipped) Folder”. The original folder – eg Projectpics – will not be changed, but its contents will magically appear in a single file called Projectpics.zip, which can be uploaded to the chosen service. In Mac OS X, you Control-click the folder and then select Compress from the menu.

I don’t see how selecting an item from a menu can be harder than doing something by tapping a screen in multiple places while making several up, down and side-swipes for no visible reason, but there you go.

Next!

Once you have most of the photos, you can prune them, run a batch file to create display copies, and upload those to one or more group galleries on DropEvent, Flickr, or whichever system you prefer. This would enable everyone to see the best photos, and might prompt a few who haven’t contributed to upload their own files.

And if you can use the experience to create a system that will last for five years or more, that will make things easier for you in the future.

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