A fool’s guide to photo sharing

You may also want to consider a cloud service, such as Flickr, DropBox or Google+ Photos for backup, selective or even primary storage.

You may also want to consider a cloud service, such as Flickr, DropBox or Google+ Photos for backup, selective or even primary storage.

Published Jul 26, 2013

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London - Remember holiday snaps? You went on holiday with a camera and a couple of rolls of film and merrily snapped away at the hotel pool, on the beach or at some folkloric event.

Then you returned home, took the film to the chemist’s and a few days later you were passing your happy snaps around: “This is us on the beach??? me with that woman from St Albans .??.??. me with a donkey .??.??. Jeff looking a bit tipsy .??.??.”

Times have changed. Now you don’t even need a camera: you use your phone – and the exciting thing about smartphone cameras is that you can share your holiday photographs immediately, no matter where you are in the world.

This was brought home to me recently when my son who was travelling through South America instantly shared his snaps of Copacabana and Galapagos.

Sharing snaps like this, I’ve discovered, is cheap, easy and fun. Many people do it through Facebook but there are alternatives that are easier to use:

 

Photostream

If you have an iPhone, you can easily instantly share photos via Apple’s Photostream. Find it at apple.com/uk/icloud/features/ photo-stream.html. There is also an easy way to put photos on your home TV via Apple TV, a small attachment that costs £100 (about R1 500).

With Photostream, you can take a photo on one Apple device and it automatically appears on all your other devices, including your Mac or PC. Import new pictures to your computer from a digital camera, and iCloud magically sends copies to your iPhone, iPad and iPod. To put pictures on Photostream, you need an iCloud account which costs from £14 a year. People will be able to view your photos on Photostream free of charge.

 

Dropbox

Samsung’s picture-sharing programme is Dropbox. A current promotion gives new customers with Dropbox pre-installed on their phones 48GB of storage free of charge – and that’s a lot of beach snaps. Anyone else can sign up to Dropbox free and get 2GB of storage, while a monthly subscription of £6 gets you 100GB. Sharing photos and videos is easy.

 

Other options

If you’re looking to share the odd photo just with friends and relatives rather than dozens of mere acquaintances, Instagram – owned by Facebook – is easy to use and free. You should also investigate other photosharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa, or file-sharing sites like SkyDrive or Google Drive, which are both free. - Mail On Sunday

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