These days, thanks to the portability of our phones, the popularity of digital cameras and Instagram’s democratization of photo editing, it’s easy to fill up our phone’s with a camera roll’s worth of images even on the shortest trip. What’s more difficult is how to share photos with friends and family in a manageable and curated way.
There’s an endless amount of file-sharing sites, mobile apps, trendy photo-printing companies and online gallery tools out there, and they each do different things in different ways. Plus, not everyone in your network is necessarily on Instagram or Facebook, and you don’t want to spam your entire follower base with dozens of shots of your scenic hike or delicious breakfast.
Find more ways to organize and backup your photos and data in Michael Clark’s class, The Professional Photographer’s Digital Workflow.
Fret no further. Below, a definitive roundup of easy-to-use, tech-powered, free (or cheap), secure solutions (beyond Flickr.com and Photobucket) for sharing your best photos with friends and family.
Tripcast:
This (free!) living travel journal, available for ios, Android and web (for both Mac or Windows), lets you seamlessly assemble photos and videos of your trip and invite people at home to follow along. You can use it to automatically crowdsource what your fellow travelers are capturing, too, so you don’t have to figure out a clunky DropBox or AirDrop workaround to include other people’s pics in your digital scrapbook. Tripcast even lets you tag individual photos by location and view them on a map in real time. Sign up for a free account today to start your photo sharing with friends and family members today!
Chatbooks:
If you’d rather wait until you’re back home to share a curated, complete capsule of your travel experiences, Chatbooks could be your solve for free image hosting. This family-run business totally gets the pain of sifting through tons of duplicates and blurry throwaways; appending dates to image when you can barely remember the name of the restaurant in the photo, and picking from hundreds of book themes and paper qualities to create a single album. Their painless and affordable service lets you automatically create photo books or archival-quality prints from your smartphone photos, iPhone favorites or social media posts. (You can also compile a book manually if you want more control.) Chatbooks automatically arranges photos in chronological order, and its user-friendly interface makes it super simple to shift images around and add contributors so you can efficiently include your fellow travelers’ selects. There are just two book sizes to choose from, and a reasonable selection of cover designs, so you can spend more time reminiscing about your trip than creating a keepsake of it. Books start at just $10.
Google Photos:
It’s no surprise Google has a photo product that addresses almost every user desire when it comes to curating and sharing pictures. Google Photos is available on Android of course, but also on ios, web browser and desktop app. Uploading images from a bunch of different people and sources — smartphone, DSLR, GoPro — is a breeze, and you can create an album of your trip within a few easy clicks or taps. Google Photos will even create gifs, collages and movies of your images, and the insanely useful visual search functionality lets you pull up photos of a certain person, location or even an object (for example, a cool statue or gorgeous waterfall). You can even search by emoji! Google’s built-in photo editing tools and the fact that the service gives you free, unlimited photo storage is an added bonus that makes this a worthwhile photo sharing site. And if you want to share albums of your trip, you can make a photo book, too. This unlimited storage option is perfect for unlimited uploads and instant photo sharing.
Amazon Photos:
If you’re an Amazon Prime member and not using Amazon Photos, you’re missing out. It allows you to store and share unlimited photos on desktop or mobile (you can create and share a link to any album with anyone, even if they don’t have an Amazon account), and also order prints, cards, photo books, calendars and more with free shipping. You can’t add captions or notes to photos, but you can edit them directly in Amazon Photos and automatically sort by place, date, person or thing. You can also create a Group within the software to collect and share pictures and videos from other people you traveled with.
Animoto:
If photo slideshows are more your jam for sharing travel highlights with friends and family members, check out the icloud based Animoto. It’s incredibly simple to use — zero video expertise required, seriously — and lets you share your finished product easily via email or social media. Upload photos and video clips, assemble into a storyboard and add text and background music (Animoto’s music library of more than 1,000 licensed songs lets you sort by 26 different categories, or else by mood, genre, tempo, song length or instrumental vs. vocal). Personal plans start at $8/month, after a 14-day free trial.
Find more ways to organize and backup your photos and data in Michael Clark’s class, The Professional Photographer’s Digital Workflow.
