Solutions for sharing photos and videos

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Rahul Khosla

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Hi. Looking for recommendations for a good platform / solution where I can post about 75 photos and 5 videos of my wildlife trip as an album which my friends can access and view online - without needing to buy or subscribe to anything AND without degrading image quality. Grateful for suggestions. I tried SmugMug but it’s a bit complicated for the receiver to access the material.
 
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I think Flickr might work for you Rahul. You can create albums and notify people you want to share them with.
 
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What you need is a host that you can link to. The other suggestions are good solutions but I use OneDrive which comes with any Hotmail email address (and maybe other products) and I get 5GB free storage in line with other similar schemes provided by google, Dropbox and others. More storage can be bought if you want to go over 5GB. Be wary though as some are more expensive than others.

Do you want people just to be able to view, or view and download?

Regarding image quality, bear in mind that even with good internet speeds uploading hi res files will take some time where web jpgs, for me, takes seconds. I can upload 30 web jpgs in a couple of minutes but when I tried a hi res tiff it took ages. Even if you have great speed, those who might want to download/view might struggle. So if, for instance you want to share a 16bit tiff image of 260mb it will take minutes with a good internet speed and an album maybe an hour(s). Videos might be worse. Not familiar with video formats and file sizes.
 
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dabhand16 said:
What you need is a host that you can link to. The other suggestions are good solutions but I use OneDrive which comes with any Hotmail email address (and maybe other products) and I get 5GB free storage in line with other similar schemes provided by google, Dropbox and others. More storage can be bought if you want to go over 5GB. Be wary though as some are more expensive than others.

Do you want people just to be able to view, or view and download?

Regarding image quality, bear in mind that even with good internet speeds uploading hi res files will take some time where web jpgs, for me, takes seconds. I can upload 30 web jpgs in a couple of minutes but when I tried a hi res tiff it took ages. Even if you have great speed, those who might want to download/view might struggle. So if, for instance you want to share a 16bit tiff image of 260mb it will take minutes with a good internet speed and an album maybe an hour(s). Videos might be worse. Not familiar with video formats and file sizes.
Click to expand...

These are good points thank you ! I already have DropBox - perhaps I can use that to share : but if I do that with JPEGs, will image quality be as good for the receiver as when I see those JPEGs on my system?
 
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Adobe Spark might work for you, as I understand it you do not need to have a subscription. It's an interesting program and offers multiple ways to show your work. All of the products are created on the Adobe server and then you are given a link to put in an email for friends.
 
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Rahul Khosla said:
These are good points thank you ! I already have DropBox - perhaps I can use that to share : but if I do that with JPEGs, will image quality be as good for the receiver as when I see those JPEGs on my system?
Click to expand...

Most of us take the time and trouble to get our images the best we can, both in the taking and in post processing. The one thing we cannot have any influence on is what equipment the viewer of your images possesses.

For some time now I always think about who will be viewing my images and what are they going to be viewed with. For instance, I take pictures of the home games for my local rugby club and will send them between 250 and 350 images. What is the final use of these images? The rugby club members will look at them on a smartphone and some will end up on their web site. Do I spend hours and hours in editing these images? Not on your life! I shoot on Saturdays between 2pm - 4.30 (kick off times vary with shorter days in Winter) and I aim to deliver the pictures the next day. 320 images from a game will be around 17GB of RAW files on my hard drive and 317 web sized jpgs are 366mb. I don't keep (or even produce) tiffs of these images but a 16 bit single image will be about 260mb and an 8 bit 130mb. Would I make large prints from any of these jpgs? Not on your life. If I am going to get a large print from an image I will treat it very differently unless it is a small sized family happy snap.

So you can spend hours taking your pictures, more hours in post processing to make them really perfect. You save them as 16bit tiffs at full resolution and each image for me is then 260mb. You put them in the cloud and the person who will look at them only has a $100 phone and a very poor internet connection. If he ever gets to see any of your images how do you think that his device will show them? His low resolution screen will give him something, but at the same quality that you see? I doubt it.

My desktop monitor is an Eizo and it is calibrated regularly. This is my editing machine, yet I know that most people will edit using a laptop and the majority of laptops are incapable of displaying more than 60% of the sRGB colour space. My Eizo does 100% of sRGB and 94% of RGB. So you talk of maintaining your image quality, but if you edit with a laptop, chances are that you can't see correct colours on it. That is assuming that your eyes are OK and AFAIK, most men are a bit colour blind (me included) to boot. Add to this that some have less than perfect vision anyway and will never see an image like you do. Come to think of it, nobody will ever see an image just as you do because we are all different.

Finally I guess I'm going to have to ask what is your definition of quality. Maybe this should have been the first and only question.

I guess that what I'm saying is don't get hung up worrying about how other people will see your images. This is something that you have absolutely no control or influence on.
 
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I apologize because I have not read all of the previous comments but I am going to add my two cents worth. There are a lot of sharing methods that work well for users that you are going to be sharing files with regularly. These services may require creating accounts for the end users, which is not a problem if they need to share files regularly. What I found is that for the users that may only need to view files for a single event or only a few times a web based gallery was the best approach.

I have used SmugMug for a long time and I have been happy with it and I have learned a trick that makes it much easier. If I need to share a gallery with a group, I create the gallery but then I have a bitly.com account and I shorten the url to make it easier for groups to find the gallery. For instance, my url may end up being something like bit.ly/mytrip2020. There are a number of url shortening services and as long as you don't want to get to advanced the accounts are usually free.

The url shortening approach works well for any type of web based gallery where you want to prevent end users from having to navigate and browse through other galleries to find the appropriate one.
 
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dabhand16 said:
Most of us take the time and trouble to get our images the best we can, both in the taking and in post processing. The one thing we cannot have any influence on is what equipment the viewer of your images possesses.

For some time now I always think about who will be viewing my images and what are they going to be viewed with. For instance, I take pictures of the home games for my local rugby club and will send them between 250 and 350 images. What is the final use of these images? The rugby club members will look at them on a smartphone and some will end up on their web site. Do I spend hours and hours in editing these images? Not on your life! I shoot on Saturdays between 2pm - 4.30 (kick off times vary with shorter days in Winter) and I aim to deliver the pictures the next day. 320 images from a game will be around 17GB of RAW files on my hard drive and 317 web sized jpgs are 366mb. I don't keep (or even produce) tiffs of these images but a 16 bit single image will be about 260mb and an 8 bit 130mb. Would I make large prints from any of these jpgs? Not on your life. If I am going to get a large print from an image I will treat it very differently unless it is a small sized family happy snap.

So you can spend hours taking your pictures, more hours in post processing to make them really perfect. You save them as 16bit tiffs at full resolution and each image for me is then 260mb. You put them in the cloud and the person who will look at them only has a $100 phone and a very poor internet connection. If he ever gets to see any of your images how do you think that his device will show them? His low resolution screen will give him something, but at the same quality that you see? I doubt it.

My desktop monitor is an Eizo and it is calibrated regularly. This is my editing machine, yet I know that most people will edit using a laptop and the majority of laptops are incapable of displaying more than 60% of the sRGB colour space. My Eizo does 100% of sRGB and 94% of RGB. So you talk of maintaining your image quality, but if you edit with a laptop, chances are that you can't see correct colours on it. That is assuming that your eyes are OK and AFAIK, most men are a bit colour blind (me included) to boot. Add to this that some have less than perfect vision anyway and will never see an image like you do. Come to think of it, nobody will ever see an image just as you do because we are all different.

Finally I guess I'm going to have to ask what is your definition of quality. Maybe this should have been the first and only question.

I guess that what I'm saying is don't get hung up worrying about how other people will see your images. This is something that you have absolutely no control or influence on.
Click to expand...
I agree with you 100% and I still want to make every pic look as good as I can make it even if it is just for my own viewing. I'd bet a lot people are like that.
 
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gKhan said:
I agree with you 100% and I still want to make every pic look as good as I can make it even if it is just for my own viewing. I'd bet a lot people are like that.
Click to expand...

I'd say that most people are like that. There are a few people who loose sleep over how others will see their pictures - not only here but on other forums too - and other people who don't know that other people will not be seeing the image exactly as they see them themselves, and I guess they are the happiest.
 
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Rahul Khosla said:
Hi. Looking for recommendations for a good platform / solution where I can post about 75 photos and 5 videos of my wildlife trip as an album which my friends can access and view online - without needing to buy or subscribe to anything AND without degrading image quality. Grateful for suggestions. I tried SmugMug but it’s a bit complicated for the receiver to access the material.
Click to expand...

You say you want no fee sharing site, but say you tried Smugmug? For what it’s worth, I have used both Google Photos and Flickr sites to share with family and friends. The groundrules keep changing as to storage space and resolution on these free platforms, but even if you upgrade them for more storage/higher Rez,, they are relatively inexpensive

I decided that keeping files in 3 platforms (originally Flickr, then Google for friends/family) plus Smugmug for paid work became too unwieldy, I now use Smugmug exclusively regardless of nature of the images and it is quite easy to send a link for the F &F images to those I want to share with. Not sure why you had troubled e. Once the gallery is set up, I restrict all galleries to only those with the link and simply copy and paste that link to send to F&F’s. And - I can also adjust the file sizes viewable in settings. So when I link to F & F, I use resolution appropriate to the end use. If the user is gonna just look at the images on tablet or monitor, I drop res down to facilitate user friendliness, but if the file is going to be printed, I size higher as needed. For business purposes, I set galley to display at lowest rez files available and watermark the images.
 
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To add to what Dabhand (Graham) said, here's my (long) story:
I was asked to photograph the wedding of a friend's daughter about 7 years ago. They didn't have the budget to hire a professional, so I agreed to do it for free. I set the camera to produce both RAW and Jpeg Basic images and covered the wedding from beginning to end, bride and groom dressing, setting up the venue, ceremony itself, group and individual portraits afterwards, reception, etc.

Because I never work with Jpeg images I didn't bother to adjust the camera to optimize the Jpeg images - no sharpening, no color saturation, contrast etc. I was going to have them make a limited selection of the images they liked, and I would then process those RAW images and print them the size they specified.

During the process I shot hundreds of images. After the wedding I gave them a thumb drive with all the images. I asked them to look at the Jpegs and advise me which ones they wanted enlarged and printed for framing. My idea was to also cull out the poor images from the RAW files and then turn the remaining images into Tiff files for further editing later. These folks were eventually going to get the best images I could produce. They could then go to a store with those final edited images and have any of them printed 4X6" or any other size they preferred. This would have been separate from the initial enlargements I would have given them.

They never made the initial selection that I asked them for, so after a while I selected two images that I liked, printed them 8X10" and framed them. This I presented to them. Imagine my surprise and horror to see later that the bride had posted all those plain, unedited Jpeg images on her Facebook page. Talk about instant gratification!

That episode, and many others after convinced me that the majority of folks who are not photographers are not nearly as discerning as I am about photos. Most of them are satisfied with images that I would not want to print and hang on my own walls. So now when I'm shooting for someone else I make sure to also produce an optimized Jpeg in camera, because that's most likely going to be good enough.

My opinion is that any images you want to post online to share from your wildlife trip, do them in Jpegs the same way as we post images in these forums. That should be good enough.
 
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Rassie said:
To add to what Dabhand (Graham) said, here's my (long) story:
I was asked to photograph the wedding of a friend's daughter about 7 years ago. They didn't have the budget to hire a professional, so I agreed to do it for free. I set the camera to produce both RAW and Jpeg Basic images and covered the wedding from beginning to end, bride and groom dressing, setting up the venue, ceremony itself, group and individual portraits afterwards, reception, etc.

Because I never work with Jpeg images I didn't bother to adjust the camera to optimize the Jpeg images - no sharpening, no color saturation, contrast etc. I was going to have them make a limited selection of the images they liked, and I would then process those RAW images and print them the size they specified.

During the process I shot hundreds of images. After the wedding I gave them a thumb drive with all the images. I asked them to look at the Jpegs and advise me which ones they wanted enlarged and printed for framing. My idea was to also cull out the poor images from the RAW files and then turn the remaining images into Tiff files for further editing later. These folks were eventually going to get the best images I could produce. They could then go to a store with those final edited images and have any of them printed 4X6" or any other size they preferred. This would have been separate from the initial enlargements I would have given them.

They never made the initial selection that I asked them for, so after a while I selected two images that I liked, printed them 8X10" and framed them. This I presented to them. Imagine my surprise and horror to see later that the bride had posted all those plain, unedited Jpeg images on her Facebook page. Talk about instant gratification!

That episode, and many others after convinced me that the majority of folks who are not photographers are not nearly as discerning as I am about photos. Most of them are satisfied with images that I would not want to print and hang on my own walls. So now when I'm shooting for someone else I make sure to also produce an optimized Jpeg in camera, because that's most likely going to be good enough.

My opinion is that any images you want to post online to share from your wildlife trip, do them in Jpegs the same way as we post images in these forums. That should be good enough.
Click to expand...

Just curious - you still friendly with that bride’s father? If you are, you are a better man than I. 😄
 
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I've used Dropbox for years to share and move photographs and have never had a problem with degraded images. Dropbox used to be really easy to use, but I find the newest iteration much less user friendly (maybe it's just me) -- however it has not impacted the images I share.
 
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Rahul Khosla said:
These are good points thank you ! I already have DropBox - perhaps I can use that to share : but if I do that with JPEGs, will image quality be as good for the receiver as when I see those JPEGs on my system?
Click to expand...
If you have Dropbox, why not use it? You can test if they compress the viewing of jpeg files, but unless you are extremely worried, I suspect they do not compress images like Facebook is reported to do.

If your want something a little nicer looking, there are many options. It really comes down to what you want. And to be honest, most folks will look once at your stuff, and be done. The shelf life on an online image is about 10 seconds. If it is posted on social media, it may hang around longer, but the viewing time is still about 10 seconds at most. We are awash in images as a society. I post or share very few images online these days.

Good luck,

--Ken

P.S. And it is good to remember that many modern phones in use today have screens with greater pixel densities than many monitors, so while viewing an image on a phone generally means a small screen, it does not necessarily mean that it is a bad screen. The new iPhone 12 Pro Max even supports DCI-P3. So it is best not to assume size and quality automatically go hand in hand for viewing screens on devices.
 
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Rassie said:
That episode, and many others after convinced me that the majority of folks who are not photographers are not nearly as discerning as I am about photos. Most of them are satisfied with images that I would not want to print and hang on my own walls. So now when I'm shooting for someone else I make sure to also produce an optimized Jpeg in camera, because that's most likely going to be good enough.

My opinion is that any images you want to post online to share from your wildlife trip, do them in Jpegs the same way as we post images in these forums. That should be good enough.
Click to expand...

Amen.

In post #10 I said 'For some time now I always think about who will be viewing my images and what are they going to be viewed with.' and for me this works a treat. What is the final use of these images going to be? This influences what I do with images varying from minimal Lightroom only tweaks to (for me) a long time spent on each image from a studio shoot or location shoot with a model.

Since I've added Fuji cameras to my kit I'm astonished at the jpg quality straight out of camera but I stiil always shoot in RAW!
 
I did not read all the replies.

I have a paid Flickr account- works great for photo sharing. I also have an Instagram account and YouTube account, both are free and have video.
 
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