In my world digital cameras are about as prevalent as film cameras, and love it or not, they make it very easy to share photos. We don’t have much family in the city where we live, so posting pictures of the baby on a website is something that everyone in my family wanted. My grandma (who is over 80 and online every day) emails me when I haven’t uploaded recent pictures of Madame. I’ve got to keep it up to date, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time dealing with it.
What I’m using now to share her photos is a moblog set up on Text America. A free service, Text America allows you to set up a quick and painless website, where you can upload, post and share images. The service is really for moblogging – taking pictures of your life with your camera-phone and emailing them from your phone to share on the web instantly – and that’s pretty much all I used it for before I was a dad. Originally I was going to make a unique website just for her photos, but the Text America site is just way too easy. Now I take pictures of the baby (with my phone or my digital camera), save them on my computer, and then email the pictures that I like to the moblog. Put a caption in the subject line of the email and your image is up on the internet as fast as the email is sent – all for free. Plus you can customize the moblog you pick with a little tweaking (I replaced an image and made a graphic for the title and it came out pretty good). There is advertising on the pages, but nothing too obtrusive at all. It’s way better than sending email attachments of photos, and for free you can’t beat it.