How do you share photos with parents after a big event such as a school trip or residential? I don’t mean via a blog so that they can see them, I mean sharing so that they can get a copy of a picture of their child.
I’ve used Picasa in the past as my previous school used Google Apps (and my current one is about to) and Picasa gives each user 1GB of photo storage. We simply created an account called Hampton Court and then uploaded 300 or so photos from our Hampton Court visit. This was done fairly easily and then I could share the photos in a few ways.
1) Public – So anyone could go and look at them. I could put a link on our school website or blog and then parents could see everything. But then so could everyone else.
2) Shared with certain people – This meant the children needed to login to their Google accounts to be able to access the photos. This was perfect as we had been using Google Apps for two years, the logins were ingrained and the parents could sit with the children and access the photos together.
Now, at Riders we are using Google Apps in a minimal sense at the moment. We are in the process of buying devices for September but there isn’t really a way for pupils to use the internet in school yet. So this means we haven’t yet given them Google logins. I needed to find a different way of sharing photos from our residential trip. Some parents had provided cameras for the tip, but many had not so I promised that I would take loads (500+ in fact) and then share them when we got back.
I looked around for a simple way of sharing photos and someone on Twitter (Phil_Timmins) suggested Cloudup. It’s free and allows 1000 documents/photos. Just drag and drop them to upload and then each gallery can be password protected too. So I can share the links with parents and send the password home via a newsletter with the child. Easy!
Cloudup is free at the moment and I’m sure will be chargeable at some point, but for now, it provides a quick, painfree way of sharing photos with parents and friends.
Here’s an example gallery using photos from my O2 climb
It appears that Cloudup is invite only at the moment, but I have a few invites available via this link
Hi Ian,
Is there any reason that you’ve not using WordPress to do this – setting up a password protected post / or deploying a membership site isn’t too tricky. Yes bandwidth does cost – but thumbnails in WP and then a link to Dropbox to download a zipfile of the photos should meet what you need?
I’m not a fan of Google Apps – it’s just too clunky and unintuitive for parents – the only selling point are the legacy accounts which remain “free” to use to those that were lucky enough to grab them. Another problem with Google Apps – there’s just no workflow or “push” to tell parents that photographs are there or that updates are in. My experience with Google Apps is that that LSA’s put their heart and soul into update the sites but logins from parents remain non-existent.
Just my 2p
Steve
The thing is, I don;;t want parents to download a 500MB file of all photos. So seeing them all and then downloading the ones they need is much better. As for legacy accounts, I’m not sure what you mean. Google Apps remains free for any school users, I have created accounts for parents before but not always needed.
Hi Ian, thanks I wasn’t aware Google Apps was still available for schools, seems it’s open to non-profits too.
There are a bunch of gallery Plugins that run on WordPress (self-hosted) that allow individual photo downloads. The only consideration is bandwidth, this could be mitigated by using a free CDN such as ClouldFlare.
… or thinking out of the box, wordpress.com allows 3GB storage on a free account. A site set up specifically for an event would take too long to set up and would allow individual downloads.
Hope that helps.