Group Galleries?

saxon75

I recently had a big family event where lots of the attendees took pictures, and it would be really useful to have one central gallery where everyone could view their pictures. I'd like to be able to use my Smugmug account for this, since I like Smugmug's choice of print labs better than what you can get from Picasa or flickr, plus I prefer the way Smugmug's galleries look.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's a convenient way to do this. Here are the options I thought of for setting up something like this:

- Have everyone email me their pictures and I can manually add them to a gallery on my account. Very tedious.

- Give everyone my full login information. Obviously not something I want to do, plus I'm not even sure it's allowed by the Smugmug TOS.

- Set up an assistant password and give that out. This is still not a great option because it allows too much access to change things.

- Set an email password and allow people to upload via email. This is a possibility, but I don't really want to give people the ability to keep uploading via email forever. It would be much easier if I could just open uploads for a single gallery.

Have I missed anything? Is this even allowed? Would this be a feature that could possibly be added in the future?

SteveM

Hi Saxon,

Yep, those are all allowed, but remember, you're responsible for the security of your own account, and accidents do happen. I would be very careful who I trust with your login info. That should really be kept to one household or less.

With the latter email option, remember when you have all of the photos from this event, you can change the email password to stop future uploads. The email option is definitely the safest for your usage case.

If you can gather all of these folks and their photos together within a 14 day period of time, consider instead opening a trial account with a separate email address, then make use of any of the options you listed. When all photos are uploaded by any method of your choosing, give us a shout at the help desk and we can move that gallery over to your main site PROVIDED NEITHER account has a SmugVault.

Now, this isn't something we're able to do routinely, but we're happy to do it on this one occasion if it'll help make things easier for you and your peeps.

I hope that offers some options!

saxon75

Thanks!

saxon75

Just to add, though, I do think it would be a great feature if there were some way to have a "guest upload" feature or something like that, configurable on a per-gallery basis. I'm sure there are security and load issues you'd have to address in implementing that, but having the ability to create true collaborative galleries would just be awesome. But anyway, thanks.

Allen

The email upload would be a pain because they all go into the same gallery.
You would not know who's photo is who's. They would have to enter their
name in the email body and I think that's broken, at least they never told us
it was fixed. Plus most forget to do it.

Smugmug needs to add the senders email address to uploaded photo captions
or somewhere the site owner can see it..

SamirD

saxon75 wrote: »

I recently had a big family event where lots of the attendees took pictures, and it would be really useful to have one central gallery where everyone could view their pictures. I'd like to be able to use my Smugmug account for this, since I like Smugmug's choice of print labs better than what you can get from Picasa or flickr, plus I prefer the way Smugmug's galleries look.

I've had to do this, and its within Picaca and Flickr where the answer was for me. Everyone uploaded to picasa and then I migrated those to SM via Smugglr.