📸 How to Share Photos with Family (Without Texting 50 Pictures)

Frank Bravo 0:00
You just got back from a trip. Or maybe it was a birthday party or a graduation, and your phone is full of pictures that you're actually very happy with. So you obviously want to share them with other people. So you open up photos and you start tapping. You grab a whole bunch of them, and then you send them off to your family. Done. Right. Everybody gets to see the pictures. Well, then it starts. Your brother texts you about his phone buzzing 40 times in a row while he was sitting in an important meeting. Or your sister says they all came through, but they're all blurry. Or maybe it was your mom who called because she found the one of the cake. But she wants to know how to save it. And could you just send it to her again? Or maybe that's not you at all. Maybe you're on the other end of this and somebody is sending you photos. Either way, there's a better way to do this, and it's not as complicated as it seems to be. And today we're going to sort all this out. Hi, and welcome to your Tech Makeover, the podcast that gives you tips and tricks to help you simplify and get more out of the technology in your life. I'm your host, Frank Bravo Today's topic is how to share photos with family and friends the right way. In my last episode, we talked about getting your photos safely synced and hopefully backed up. If you missed that one, it should be the last episode just before this one. This episode is all about getting those photos to the people who want them, without blowing up anyone's phone and making sure they arrive looking good. So here's something I picked up from doing this with a lot of people. For a lot of years, almost all of us picked the way to share photos based on what is easiest for us, which makes sense, but is not always the right answer. You know we are the ones holding the phones, but we have to think about what happens when the other person gets it. You might get that phone call. You might spend 20 minutes on a speakerphone saying, no, tap the blue words no, no, the blue words no. The ones, the picture. We've all been there, right? For me, I found the trick is the best thing to do is to pick the method based on the person who is opening it, not me who is sending it. And once I started thinking about it this way, I noticed that most families really come down to three kinds of people. There's the person who's fine with it all. That's the camp that I live in. For the most part, I'll install an app. I'll sign up for an account. I'll poke around until I figure things out. There's plenty of options with these sorts of people. But then there's the person who was just happy to tap a link and look at whatever comes up. They're not going to create the account. They're not going to remember another password, and they're definitely not going to download anything. This is where most people are. And then you have the third camp of people who are just not going to look at their devices at all. For this. They want a printed copy, and in some cases, they're going to get somebody else to take those digital images and do that for them. It's not because they don't want the photo, it's that they just don't want to deal with the technology. Hopefully by the time we're done with this episode, we're going to move people from that third group at least into that second group. But before we do that, let me talk about how texting is maybe the worst option for all of this. Understanding that makes the rest of this make sense. You've heard me say this stuff before when everyone's in a conversation on an iPhone. Your messages travel through Apple's own service. The photos come out sharp when there's an Android phone in the group. It might work, but sometimes the connection falls back to the older carrier texting systems, and that's when the photos get squeezed down to a fraction of their size so they can fit through that much narrower pipe. This is why photos sometimes arrive looking soft or kind of blurry. It's not. The picture itself was bad. It just got compressed to make it look that way. I covered this in detail back in July, in an episode where I talked about how group text work, and if you want that full picture, you might want to go back and look at that. This way, you know why photos look like they come from the 1990s instead of modern day. So if you've missed it, go back and listen to that because I think you'd get a lot out of it. The short version of it, though, is that any mix of iPhoto and Android detects batching of photos gives it maybe the worst looking version of your own pictures. So to answer the question that I get asked most often is whether I should send them as one of the time photos or send them all at once. The real answer is neither sending them one at a time is worse, because now I have 60 notifications going off or sending them all at once. They still all get compressed. It really doesn't matter. I guess sending them all at once is slightly less rude, but it's equally blurry at the end. If it's 1 or 2 pictures that someone wants to see then texted to them, that's not a big deal. I'm not saying don't ever send text messages with photos in it, but think before you do. And once your past 5 or 6. Absolutely. Stop texting and make sure you use a link. A quick shout out to listeners like you who helped make your tech make possible. Your support helps keep this podcast going and I truly appreciate it. Want to contribute? Just click the link in the show notes or visit your Tech makeover.com. Plus, as a thank you. Supporters who give $25 or more will get $25 off a one time consultation with me to help you simplify your tech. Thanks for being part of your tech makeover community. Now back to what I was saying. Of all the ways to share images, this is the part that I think most of you will get a lot out of, because I think it solves the largest case, which is a mixed family, where there's some iPhones and some Android phones, and at least one person who doesn't want to install anything for any reason. Both Apple and Google Photos let you put images into an album, and then that album allows you to create a web link. It's not an app invitation, it's not an account request, but rather a plain old link. The link is something that you would text somebody, and when they tap on it, they open up in whatever web browser the person is already using on the device. The pictures come out big and sharp. There's nothing to sign up for and nothing to install. If you want to save one, you just hold your finger on it like you would any other photo and then you can save it. Or maybe they want to just show a friend so they hand over their phone. On an iPhone, you want to make sure that the shared album is in your photos app, add pictures to it, and then in the album settings, turn on the option to create a public website link. On Android, it's basically the same, but in Google Photos you put those pictures in that album and then there's a share photo link right there. But I want to you to be aware that in both cases, it may allow access to that link without logging in, which is kind of the point. But it also means anyone with that link can see the images. The other advantage of doing an album over a text blast is you can add more photos later. You know, everybody has that same link, so adding more photos just means that the next time somebody goes to that album, there's more photos for them to see. For an ongoing thing, like maybe a new grandchild or a long trip, that's a way better way than streaming a message that nobody's going to be able to scroll back through. And if the person on the other end is comfortable installing the app, then that's something that they can do to to see these photos in both services. If you were to install the app, you can set up the shared album so that people can add their own pictures. So after a family gathering, everybody's photos end up in one pile instead of scattered across multiple devices or in multiple text strings. This is something we just did for a family reunion, and it worked great. Now, for the person who's not going to look at the screen, just print the pictures for them. We have collectively decided that all the photos live on our devices now. And for a lot of older people and even people not that old, it's a real lost a print sitting on a table gets looked at maybe every day a link gets looked at once if it gets opened at all. Most drugstores have same day photo pickup, where you can order them from your phone and have someone else pick them up. There's also services that will print small books from the album and makes it a really good gift. And you can do those in about ten minutes. You could also have photos sent directly to the person. This is not a nostalgic detour. It's a realistic answer for a particular recipient. If the goal is for them to actually see the picture and they don't use the screen, then the highest technology solutions to the world might be just printing it out on a piece of paper. Another great solution is a smart frame. My parents have had one for years and we just bought my mother in law one last Christmas. It's a great gift, and even if they do look at images on their devices, it's a really good way to get the images to show with them without them having to do anything. In all of this, here's the part I keep wanting to come back to. The goal was never to share the photos. The goal is to have someone you love to see and enjoy them. Those are not necessarily the same thing. And picking the method that fits the person is much better than making it hard for them. I'd love to hear from you about a person in your family who you've had the hardest time sharing with, and what you've tried. It's different for every family, and I suspect some of you have worked out a really clever way to do this that maybe I haven't thought of. Let me know. And as always, if you have ideas for topics you'd like me to cover, please feel free to email me at Frank at YourTechMakeover.com. That's it for now. Thanks for listening to your tech makeover, if you haven't already. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so that you don't miss an episode, and you can check out your Tech makeover.com where you can find out more information about each episode. Sign up for the Substack newsletter and find out more about me. Until next time, I'm Frank. Bravo, and this has been your tech makeover.