I’ve used several different methods of getting my photos online to share them with friends and family. I’ve settled on flickr as the easiest for me (which means that I’ll get more photos up there to show off). Lately, though, I’ve run into situations where I want to just show those photos on flickr to my friends and family, not the whole world. There are a couple of reasons for this, the most sensitive is that some of my daughter’s friends families do not want just anyone to be able to see their pictures online. Yet my daughter would like to share pictures of herself and her friends with our family, so what do I do?
Well, there’s a privacy setting in flickr, you can set it for each set of photos or for individual photos. The privacy setting will make it so that only flickr members that are listed as your friends and family can see the photos. That’s fine, but only my mom and sister are members. What about other friends and family that aren’t members?
Flickr has a solution for that problem, as well, but it was confusing to me at first. It’s called a guest pass and the idea is that you create a set of photos, then you create a guest pass to those photos, and you can email this guest pass to anyone you want. When they click on the link, they can see the photos included in the set.
But I like to create my own email when I’ve set up some sets for my relatives. I just found out that you can just get the guest pass link to the set, instead of having flickr send out an email. That should work for me. I can create a set of the photos I want to share, set their privacy to friends and family, then get the guest pass link to send out to my friends and family.
That way the photos will be hidden from the general public but my relatives will be able to see them, even if they aren’t members of flickr.
So, here are the steps I take to share my photos (but hide them from the general public):
- Upload the photos to flickr, set the privacy level to friends and family only (I usually create a new set at the same time).
- Visit the set I just uploaded and click on the ‘Share This’ button
- Click on the ‘Grab the Link’ button at the bottom of the drop down window
- Add a guest pass by clicking on the Friends and Family checkboxes
- Click on the ‘Get New Link’ button
- Select the link at the top and copy and paste that into the email I send out to friends and family.
A few extra steps, but now my private photos are private and still shareable with my family.
{ 0 comments }
