Ask HN: What photo sharing solution should we use for our destination wedding?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433502

by pigcat • 3 years ago

18 33 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am getting married next week on a beach (yay!)

I'd like to collect everyone's photos into a high-res shared album.

100 friends/family are joining and we are all staying at a resort for the week. They will be taking lots of great photos during the week!

We will have a WhatsApp group chat. In my experience folks tend to send their photos there, but the image quality is very poor once it's uploaded to WhatsApp.

My two requirements:

1. Should be very low friction for people to upload. No downloading another app.

2. Images/videos should remain in original/high quality

I am willing to pay for a good solution.

Does anyone have any ideas?

My ideal solution would be a bot that you could add to a WhatsApp group chat. Images uploaded to the WhatsApp group chat also get automatically uploaded in their original quality to a shared google album. I don't think this is possible.

If anyone from WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc is reading this, I would pay a lot for a "Pro" account to have high-res photo uploads for my wedding/music festival/travel/etc group chats

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

It is something wedding photographers should offer. I've seen wedding photographers expand the traditional model and set up Purikura so people can take their own group photos:

https://www.jrpass.com/blog/say-cheese-the-ultimate-guide-to...

Pro photographers are ideally equipped for some the tough problems in wedding photography (the reception dinner that is poorly lit, large group photos, etc.) but there is going to be a lot of value in gathering and curating guest photos in 2023 and who's in a better place to do it?

I noticed these products

https://www.weddingphotoswap.com/

https://guestpix.com/weddings/

https://weddybird.com/en/photo-gallery

also this discussion

https://www.reddit.com/r/wedding/comments/14mmcqc/best_websi...

dylan6043• 3 years ago

The wedding photographer better be able to add an additional line item for services you are requesting. I have worked on site specifically for allowing group events to allow attendees to share their images directly from their phones. A QR code was provided that took them directly to the event's site. These images were available along with the professional photographers' images.

It is A LOT of work. You're specifically talking about an event with everyone's mom gathered together. The tech support for a site like this based on the users being targeted is a total nightmare. The simplest tasks are confounding to people. UI/UX definitely has a lot of heavy lifting to do here. This may or may not be the wedding photog's skillset.

The wedding photog has enough on their plate to deal with. I personally would not want them to be asked to provide tech support to tech illiterate family/friends of bridezilla.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

Exactly, the wedding photographer ought to set you up with a "white label" version of the above web sites or just pick one out and set it up for you. I wouldn't expect them to code it up any more than I'd expect them to build a custom camera. On the other hand it ought to be part of the service because it is something they can do in a few minutes without thinking about it while the organizers could struggle with it.

(Kinda funny that my photographer friends online tend to automatically discount any software I've developed myself for image processing; a lot of them still think sRGB is the "standard" color space in 2023 despite mobile devices mostly being Display P3 for some time)

solardev3• 3 years ago

Anecdotal perspective: As a user, I hate these third-party services because they can't make use of the built-in features of photo sharing apps that Google and Apple already make. You have to go through some pain in the ass individual (or bulk select) upload process, deal with a long-running thread in your browser (which may be interrupted and may or may not gracefully resume), etc.

vs like in Google Photos, you just hold-select a bunch of photos you already took (and probably auto-synced to the cloud), add them to the shared album... and done! No additional friction and no re-uploading needed.

-----------

That said, I don't know if that's a common enough workflow for your average non-HN, non-power-user =/ It's possible people don't even know that feature exists.

solardev3• 3 years ago

Set up a Google Photos shared album, and an equivalent iPhone one (don't know how it works there, but presumably they have one?)

Let guests choose which one to upload to.

Do some hourly backend sync between the two. https://www.multcloud.com/tutorials/sync-google-photos-to-ic...

Also, congrats!!

pigcat4• 3 years ago

I hadn't considered setting up two shared albums to meet people on their platform, so thanks for that idea!

dylan6043• 3 years ago

You might want to browse through this HN post about Google Drive losing data that's on the front page at the same time your AskHN is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431743

within the comments, there's people also complaining about losing photos as well. just so you're fully informed

ua741• 3 years ago

One problem that I often encounter is that people either don't use Google Photos/iCloud, or they don't have sufficient free space in their cloud storage account to upload photos/videos. Additionally, in the case of Google Photos, if the person has configured Standard Quality for their personal account backup, the shared photos will not be in the original quality.

dhruvmittal• 3 years ago

I asked all of our friends to upload to a Google Photos shared album. Most of my friends use Android and most of my wife's friends use Apple-- didn't hear any complaints about Google Photos. Our experience was that most people have a google account anyways and are familiar enough with Google Photos.

The people I asked for advice said that they'd prefer to download Google Photos to upload/view photos vs. a third-party service that didn't require them to download anything (i.e. Synology photo request).

devoutsalsa• 3 years ago

For Google Photos, make sure to set the "BACKUP QUALITY FOR PHOTOS & VIDEOS" option to "Original quality". It's the very top radio button under the settings (for my using Google Chrome on my laptop). Can't miss it.

h1fra• 3 years ago

I have used https://www.wedshoots.com/ few months ago. Never underestimate your guests to not understand tech or not even bother uploading anything, even if they love you.

If I had to do it again I would stick to WhatsApp and manually ask to get high res for the best pictures.

pigcat4• 3 years ago

Honestly this might be the way. As you correctly pointed out I'm concerned even a Google Photos/iPhoto shared album is too much friction for most people.

solardev3• 3 years ago

The last couple of weddings I went to just had Polaroids on site (yeah, the old school kind). It was fun for attendees with none of the digital hassles. You can scan them (or not) afterward, but either way you have physical keepsakes, often signed by the guests!

tayo42• 3 years ago

My wife did alot of the work, but she set up a Google drive folder then posted qr codes to the upload link around the venue for people to upload photos too. We emailed the link out a few times.

Espressosaurus• 3 years ago

I've used a shared google drive or google photos to good enough effect, but that presumes nobody is running short on space.

I've also seen some screwiness however so I'll be watching with interest what other people suggest.

bilekas2• 3 years ago

I was just going to suggest this.. it's one of the easier for non techy people to understand too from what I've noticed.

muststopmyths• 3 years ago

If anyone from WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc is reading this, I would pay a lot for a "Pro" account to have high-res photo uploads for my wedding/music festival/travel/etc group chats

Doesn't Telegram allow full-resolution sharing of pictures out of the box ?

Unfortunately, you'll probably get people sharing whichever way they're most comfortable with and have to ask them specifically for originals.

dvngnt_• 3 years ago

I think if you choose file, it will share the uncompressed file vs photo from gallery

bilekas2• 3 years ago

Telegram does intact have "lossless" image transfer.. might not be suitable on a mobile device though with space considerations and lack of cloud sync by design.

eitally• 3 years ago

Telegram does allow sharing full-res (both photos and videos)... but you're at the mercy of the end user to select that option at upload time, and I'm not confident this is reasonable.

btgeekboy• 3 years ago

We used GuestPix recently, which fulfills both of your requirements - original quality uploads, no apps to download. I’m overall pleased with the site, and the $50 was a drop in the bucket all things considered.

One thing we learned is that even though our crowd is tech savvy, we still had to hound people to upload stuff after the fact.

xrd• 3 years ago

Immich is really interesting.

I have experimented with it as an alternative to Google Photos. It has a great Android app and the web UI is almost identical to Google. It includes facial recognition (it will group your photos automatically by face, but without sending that data to an advertising company!). I'm really impressed by it.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

I haven't used the photo sharing features but I see it offered in the UI.

It is really easy to try: you can run it using docker-compose in about two minutes.

The only snag I have noticed is that the Android app will often get updated and that will then cause it to not work with the server. I have never had an issue when I just switched to the newer docker tag and restarted, but that's been a little frustrating. I suppose I should just disable automatic updates of the Android app to prevent this.

janci• 3 years ago

I would write few lines of PHP to handle a form with input type=file, upload image to a folder, make a thumbnail and show last 10 photos.

If everybody you need is on Whatsapp, I would probably try to create a read-only group (set posting permissions to you only) and let the PHP script share every uploaded photo to the group with a link to upload more.

apwell23• 3 years ago

please make sure to not leave even a single bit of trash. Hiking trail i visit frequently got taken over by gender reveals, birthday parties and now is full of trash from these parties.

Park service just put a big sign and called it a day.

c22• 3 years ago

You could get a forensic extractor like law enforcement uses and make everyone plug their phone into it before they leave.

janandonly• 3 years ago

Nowadays you can upload HD photos via WhatsApp. That is the easiest solution.

For building projects, we shared photos and videos with Cluster.

See: https://cluster.co/

pigcat4• 3 years ago

Re: WhatsApp - Oh my gosh - you are right! Thank you so much!

It's slightly annoying that it's not possible to set that to default, and I reckon a lot of guests won't remember or bother to change that each time, but it's great to know that.

autoexec• 3 years ago

I'd probably just buy a domain name and throw up a quick webpage for upload. Photos will be whatever size/quality they are when uploaded and galleries can be auto-generated. You can also add updates, maps, apologies, song requests for the reception, or anything else you want to the website. After the wedding you can leave it online forever or zip the whole thing up and store it or even mail copies out to your guests on thumb drives.

Ir0nMan• 3 years ago

While not perfect, you may want to consider Dropbox request links.

You first create a file request link and share this link with everyone. They can go to this link using their phone browser (or a browser on any device) and upload files (full high resolution files). Files automatically go into this "request" folder on your account. You can then share this folder out and have it viewable at another link.

You may want to set up couple URL redirections to these two link like mywedding.com/upload and mywedding.com/shared to make things easier and not have people asking for the link 100 times.

anotherhue• 3 years ago

Lightroom has some good functionality here. They'll need to make an account if social sign in doesn't work but only the album owner needs a subscription.

werkjohann• 3 years ago

I wouldn’t call Shared Albums in Apple Photos high quality (and certainly not original quality). Unlike in Google Photos, sharing to Apple’s Shared Albums creates a separate scaled down copy of the photo instead of creating permissions to see the original photo.

It’s super frustrating.

Ask HN: What photo sharing solution should we use for our destination wedding?

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