I just received a great question from a fellow bride about photo sharing. She asked how my guests shared photos – if I set up something centrally where people could share the photos they take. Well I did, but never found a solution I was very happy with. How about you!?! Do you have a plan in place for sharing photos?

A couple of my guests gave me photos on CD and we had our own digital photos we took over the weekend. I created an album on PhotoBucket.com hoping my guests would upload photos there for me to see. I liked that I could password protect my albums and friends and family would be able to download / purchase photos they wanted.  I even upgraded to the ‘Pro’ account that would allow me unlimited storage. (I posted the album link and password on our wedding website and emailed it to many of our family and friends.) I did purchase a couple of photos through PhotoBucket via KodakGallery and my local Target, but found the ordering process cumbersome. In fact, I didn’t really find the PhotoBucket site to be terribly user friendly. Is it just me? Is there something I’m just not ‘getting’? And my friends and family did not contribute to that gallery with their own uploads.

Since I didn’t like ordering my photos through PhotoBucket, when I want prints I upload them to my Costco.com account and pick them up at my local Costco store. So now here is a second location for some of my photos. And in a pinch, when I’ve wanted a photo right away for some reason, I’ve uploaded them to my SnapFish.com account and picked them up at my local Walgreens. So now, 3 places photos are scattered between.

But wait – there’s more! There are the facebook.com photo albums! Those are the albums I actually view the most, but I can’t purchase through there. (I can’t believe facebook isn’t making money there yet.)

And there are the pro pics! Our photographers use a site called pictage.com. They upload the photos and we review and ‘release’ the photos when we are ready for our guests to view them. I like that I can organize photos into albums, mark photos as ‘favorites’ and even pick and choose what photos I want to remain private. We and our guests can purchase photos. Pricing seems reasonable though shipping is a little slow. I can also add captions, but after all the work I did on the PhotoBucket albums, I don’t bother. Overall I like pictage, but don’t know it’s intended for professional photographers.

At least a couple of the local Aruban photographers use Google Picasa photo albums (and they’re not password protected, so I made good use of the albums when doing research on locations and decorating ideas). I tried Picasa a year and a half ago for some vacation photos and didn’t like it at all. Maybe its gotten better?

Anyway – maybe you have a better solution? If so, can you tell us about it? I’m sure there are so many people out there that are a lot more clever and organized than I am! You can post a comment or send an email to info@ourarubawedding.com!