Your boss in her bikini. Your baby nephew crammed into a Christmas stocking. About 300 shots of your sister skiing at Lake Tahoe. Pictures of somebody’s weekend barbecue.
All are online photo albums sent to your e-mail inbox, waiting for you to click and peruse. And then perhaps wonder, “Why should I care?”
The ease of online photo services means more people are uploading their digital shots and sending pics to everyone in their address book. About 26 percent of Internet users had pictures posted to an online photo service in 2004. And more than 825 million photos currently are stored at online photo services, reports InfoTrends, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass.
Online photo services are a snappy way for family and friends to quickly share photos. But too many users are sending unwanted pictures to too many people. From co-workers to cousins, we receive access to odd or irritating albums.
Sending albums might be fun for the senders but not all of our inboxes can hold huge messages. Once storage is scarce, some systems block incoming messages until more space is created.
Sterling native Johanna Baldwin, 27, avidly uses Ofoto.com to send pictures to her husband while he’s deployed in Iraq. But her inbox occasionally gets hit with snapshots that need to be deleted–not shared.
“Every once in a while I get, ‘My dog went to a birthday party!’ I actually got an album like that once, it said: ‘Dogs have birthdays, too.’ I didn’t even open it, I just deleted it. That’s fine if your dog went to a birthday party, but I don’t even know the dog who had the birthday party,” she said.
What’s meant to be convenient can sometimes be time-consuming. Baldwin has a friend who always sends large photo albums of not-so-exciting weekend events.
“She’ll send an e-mail about her weekend barbecue with 50 pictures,” she said. “I told her to cut down on the pictures. She just laughed at me. My pet peeve is just the assumption that you care to look at 50 pictures of that.”
Delete the pictures of the chops on the grill; no one cares. Unless, of course, the recipient is missing American home life. When her husband was stationed in Syria last year, Baldwin routinely sent two or three “eye candy” pictures of their home in Long Beach, Calif.
The rest of her friends receive an e-mail “invitation” and a link to view pictures at the Ofoto site. She said every user has the option to make guests register with the site, but she feels “it’s more polite to let them just look at the photos.”
Online album manners also call for an editing session before hitting “send.” Nancy Carr with the Eastman Kodak Co. makes her livelihood from pictures but still thinks less is more.
“There is a lot of responsibility on the part of the person who is sending the album to say, `Who wants to get them, and who do I want to share them with?'” she said.
Capping albums at fewer than 20 pictures “tells the full story” without taking up too much time or inbox space, she said. Limiting the recipient list also can stop photo sharers from boring co-workers or out-of-touch friends. And remember: Family members may be a captive audience, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily captivated.
“My brother just went to Ireland, and he sent everyone on his list 120 photos of Ireland,” Carr said. “People just don’t have the time.”
People don’t have the time to wade through pages of pictures or even register to view the album. That’ why Mark Sigel, 33, of Highland Park and his wife, Laurie, decided to cough up a $30 annual fee to keep a family photo Web site at smugmug.com.
Their parents and friends don’t have to plug in a password to see pictures of Sigel’s infant son, Max. And with so many online photo services available, Sigel said it’s hard to remember the username and password for each.
Forget your password and you have to wait for the service to send you an e-mail reminder. Once you’re logged in, he says, the prize can be pitiful.
“I’ve found often on other sites, they shrink down the images a lot. That was the biggest thing that annoyed me. People from Ofoto or Shutterfly would send me an e-mail telling me to go there and all I could see was tiny little pictures,” he said.
But skipping online albums and just sending hordes of photos can be just as unwelcome.
“I think one of the biggest things people do is they will send an e-mail with 20 pictures attached to it and it ends up bogging down everyone’s system. That’s a big don’t,” he said. It’s not just a matter of etiquette; it can crash older computer systems.
Another don’t: Forgetting the all-important ego self-check. Little Max is his world, but Sigel understands that not everyone wants a flood of photos.
“I think people might be less interested in seeing our child’s first time eating baby food than we are,” he said. “They don’t need to see 200 pictures of it.”
Get the picture on photo sharing
If you’re feeling guilty about deleting a photo album without looking at it–don’t. Feel guilty, that is.
Putting a photo album online doesn’t edit out the snooze factor.
“It’s the equivalent of when you go to your mother’s friend’s house and they sit you through a 400-slide show on Italy,” said Nancy Carr of the Eastman Kodak Co.
Sending pictures can be welcome, but there’s a bit of e-etiquette involved. Here’s how to be a courteous sender:
Don’t push for feedback. Some albums have a comment section. Otherwise, no e-mail reminders asking people to gush.
Keep it clean. Did you win that wet T-shirt contest while you were on spring break? Grandpa doesn’t want to know. “If you’re not comfortable with everyone in the world seeing it, you shouldn’t be putting it on a Web site and sending it out,” said Mark Sigel of Highland Park, who posts family pictures at smugmug.com.
Control the CCs. Sending albums to everyone seems like a mass e-mail, not a personal photo experience. And watch it at the workplace. “You don’t want to CC everyone in the company,” said Carr.
No more than 20 photos. Make like a photo editor and pick only the best shots that illustrate your experience, Carr advised.
— Emilie LeBeau
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Here’s sharing info–just don’t abuse it
Sending the right album to the right person without crashing the computer can be a total Kodak moment. And there are plenty of online options:
Attachments: Whatever your format, you can send a few e-mails as an attachment. To avoid crashing a friend’s home computer or bogging down his work e-mail, keep it to two or three pictures.
Blogs: Web logs let family and friends glimpse at the pictures you post. For instance, www.SMS.ac offers its members a place to blog for free.
Online albums: Create free albums at ofoto.com, shutterfly.com or snapfish.com. It’s free to join and share photos but there is a charge for making prints, usually between 20 and 30 cents for a 4-by-6 print. Prints are ordered on the Internet and sent to your home.
Web pages: Build a Web page and forward the link to select family and friends. Smugmug.com costs $29.95 per year and stores two copies of all photos in case yours are lost. Prints can be downloaded to any printer; a 4-by-6 costs about 29 cents.
— E.L.
