DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

This thread is all about HOW TO share the photos with your family.

I would like to insert a comment about WHAT to share with your family along with the photos.

Documentation.

If you have a photo of some person, event, or object that is significant to your family as a whole, it's worth considering including documentation along with the photo. Significant photos will hopefully be passed down through the family. A century from now, your great-great-great grandkid won't know what an arbitrary photo is about without some explanation.

There are several ways to include documentation with a photo, not all of them useful. Metadata is one way, but who looks at metadata? Will today's metadata even be readable a century from now? My personal opinion is that instead of sharing photos as jpgs, pngs, tifs, or whatever, share them as PDF files. You can include text with a PDF. PDFs are so widely used today that virtually everyone can view them. And a popular format is likely to last a while, or newer formats will probably be able to interpret legacy files. If the image will be impacted by text, the text can be placed on a separate page within the PDF.

I have a couple tutorials on how to put documentation onto your photos, but if you know how to put an image onto a page in a word processor, you're most of the way there.

https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-page?upnum=2991

Ednsb Loc: Santa Barbara

backblaze is backup storage. It is not designed to be a photo sharing application. You can view and download an image but it is not a simple interface or particularly fast. I checked with them directly after your comment. I think you are missing the intent which is to share images with my wife and daughter interactively.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Oh, I get the intent, but if you want to share 500K of raw or high res images, then that’s not a trivial task. ICloud is the perfect answer, but you don’t want to pay the price. Backblaze will work, but you don’t like the interface, so I have two more suggestions: (1) Cull down the 500K images to maybe 5-10K that your family will actually look at and store them as JPEGs or HEICs in Icloud - the sharing is automatic and it can be done for a few dollars a month. Your raw/high res images will be available fo them on your computer if something were done to happen to you. (2) purchase a NAS with adequate capacity and place your images there and attach it to your network. With proper credentials, your family can access it remotely with any browser, and you can organize it any way that suits you, Including a Folder of lower res JPEGS and one with raws.