I really like Picasa to edit and manage my photos. Since I also use blogger I thought that it would be a good idea to upload my vacation photos to picasaweb in order to share them with certain people.
The sharing options Picasa offers are 3.
1. Public
2. Unlisted
3. Sign in required
The first is self explanatory. The 2nd option constructs a relatively long and unique URL which you can share with you friends. They do not have to have a google account to view photos just the URL. The problem with this is that a friend can share the URL with a friend of its own and so on. This happened to someone as I read and at some point she saw a 'Nice' comment under her naked baby daughter by a 'John' person. As you can understand this is quite disturbing and the 3rd option does not actually solve it since the only difference is that you have to have a google account in order to view the photos. Yes, you are trackable, but is this the real you?
Another problem that came to my mind - I reserve copyrights for a possible Movie scenario, is what happens with geotagging, either manual or automatic? What if some pervert sees my son, or my wife, or me, or a friend of mine in a photo and comes looking? Yes, this can happen also to the street but the street you can somehow control by 'soft measures' like choosing places to be, to live, to work. What happens when the whole world sees you/me/her/him ?
Anyhow I was thinking photobucket's or flickr's password protected folders as a solution but sharing the passwd via email is just the same as giving out the 'secret URL' it can by passed along very easily. Don't anybody give me that crap about sharing the passwd via phone line or sms.
Another solution might be to filter out photos just as you do in Facebook but this conflicts with the whole sharing idea.
And what about all these web photo printing services? I've known occasions where the guy behind the booth that prints your photos has 'shared' them with someone. Hell, there's even a movie about it.
I'm totally confused to tell you the truth. If anybody has a good idea or workflow I'd really like to read about it, until then I'm suspending my online photo albums
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2 comments:
Panteli, as you can understand you can not have fine grained access to any specific photo bucket without any security credential mechanism. Meaning,what you are looking for is very difficult to be achieved for users which are not registered to any service, so that service can control or monitor their access to your content!!
So either some of them have to sign up lets say (if they have already yahoo account) to flickr . Or you can use flickr's invite to see my pictures function - which at later stage you may stop. Meaning that for one week the content is avaliable you get notifications as well if your invitation was accepted and after 1 week 1 month you discard the invite!
Or of course you filter your shared photos to thoese that personal data are not exposed based on you own personal judgment and then you share them!
But without any username/password it is very difficult for any service to give you that kind of security.
I came to realise that my real problem was that I din'd exactly new what I wanted from a photo sharing service.
After thorough thinking, searching and testing I came to the conclusion that I needed 2 things:
1. The ability to set the view permissions on a per photo basis regardless if that photo belonged to a set/album
2. The ability to revoke easily handed out permissions
Althouh I really liked picasaweb for the picasa integration it lacked the first poing. I also tried among others http://www.smugmug.com/ which I found interesting but it still lacked no.1 plus it was quite expensive.
At the end I came back right where I had started 2 years ago. Flickr. I even bought a subscription.
Let's see where that journey takes us.
Thanks Paris
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