Sharing Images

 Why Share Images?

I have banged on a lot about sharing images since we started the club, largely unsuccessfully, so I thought I would write a piece on the subject.  Looking at photographs is, in my opinion, a major part of how we learn to improve as a photographer:

• It can inspire us, you look at an image and think "I wish I had taken that"
• It can give us ideas, "I will try and do that"
• It can teach us about composition
• We learn by assessing and being assessed, self criticism and assessment by our peers is good.  We learn what others like and what they don't like.
• It gives us an opportunity to ask questions.

There are sure to be other reasons but that is enough to be going on with.

Sharing or Sending?

The simplest, and to most of us, easiest way of sharing images is to use email or messaging applications to send them to someone else.  There are problems with this:

• It adds to the email mountain that towers over us.  I bet none of you can achieve "inbox zero".  I used to jokingly threaten my engineers with the sack if they had more than 10 emails in their inbox at the end of a day as it increased the risk that something would be missed and something would go undone.  I suspect you will each have 10s or hundreds of emails in your inbox
• It is often one to one, other club members do not get to see what other people have said.  Unless we add to that mountain of emails by copying them all over the place.
• It means we all get a copy of every image, this can be a problem if we are paying for storage.  For example:
• All images on my phone are automatically copied straight onto my computer.
• All images on my computer are automatically backed up to both an external hard drive and to the cloud (iCloud and, as a backup, to Dropbox).  I pay for this online capacity.
• I manually archive onto a second hard drive to relieve the strain (and cost) of my online storage
• It makes sorting and finding our own images harder.
• The applications we use to send photographs often reduce the size of the files we send by reducing their resolution, making it difficult to assess what the full size image was like.

So, for all these reasons, I have been trying to encourage you to upload images onto a photo sharing site so we can all see them without having to download them and can discuss as a group.

Photo Sharing Sites

Flickr

 As you know Flickr was my first choice of site to use as it was one I had used in the past and was familiar with.  It is probably the market leading photography sharing site but it is designed and intended to be a public viewing platform.  It is designed so that everyone, by default can see your images and you can see everyone else's images.  The idea is that reputations can grow by the response from other photographers.

We were able to override the public viewing of our images by making them private and sending links to our friends but Flickr has now changed their terms and conditions to make this harder.  We would have to pay to upgrade to a professional account if our number of private images exceeded a small limit.

I no longer recommend we use Flickr.

Google Photos

Google Photos is my second choice recommendation for several reasons drawing on experience in our club. It is:

• private, viewing is by invitation alone.
• easier to use.
• easily used on Windows, Android, and Mac devices
• integrated with Apple iCloud so works well on my iPhone iPad and Mac.
• integrated with the software I use to create this blog (also a Google app).
• Automated back up of my images (but be wary of exceeding storage limits).
• Free up to 15GB of storage

iCloud

Functionally there is very little difference between Google Photos and iCloud.  The points about iCloud are very similar and are:

• private, view by invitation
• Easy to use
• Seamless integration across all Apple devices.  Every photo I take on my iPhone appears automatically on my (Mac) computer and iPad.  Photos I pass from my SLR to computer appear on both iPad and iPhone.
• Good integration with Adobe Lightroom for cataloguing and manipulation.
• Free up to 5GB of storage, 50GB, £0.79p per month
• Automated back ups from iPhone/iPad.

The Choice

The choice between them is dependent on which computer operating system you are working on.  If you stay exclusvely within the realms of Apple products (Mac, iPad, iPhone) then the choice is clear, iCloud.  If you also use Windows or Android then the choice swings towards Google Photos as it is easier to use on the other operating systems particularly on small screens.  There are no apps for iCloud in the other operating systems but you can access it via any browser on any operating system.  Google Photos is therefore the "winner" by a very narrow margin for our club because some of us use Windows and/or Android operating systems.

The Way Ahead

Over the next couple of weeks I will write posts on managing your images (the use of tags and albums) and the use of Google Photos.

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