How do you show your best shots?

[Ian]

I should qualify this question - I mean using your phone or a tablet.

Google Photos is good but I don't really want to pay more than the free allocation of 15GB and I'm always bumping the limit. But it has subject identification/recognition searching.

Microsoft OneDrive also has some smart features but I feel it's less optimised for smartphones and tablets - I need to look into this more. We have a family Office 365 account, so quite a bit of cloud storage is included.

I do have a Flickr account but I've rather neglected it, recently - I will have to reappraise that too - I know lots here have quite serious Flickr portfolios. Does it work well on smart devices for you?

What have I missed?

Ian

[BDennis]

I use Flickr on the iPad, phone or my laptop. There are dedicated apps on iPad / iPhone for Flickr and also on Android. I can plug the iPad into a TV over HDMI to show a Flickr album as a slide show. I’ve got a Flickr paid account and all of my processed photos end up on there. You don’t have to make them all publicly viewable either so if you have family holiday snaps they can be kept private.

The Android app for Flickr seems to have a bug where it won’t reliably download an image for sharing to WhatsApp or other social media. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I end up taking a screenshot and sharing that! Maybe it’s just my phone.

Another problem I’ve had with though with Flickr is sharing an album link. When a friend used the link since he didn’t use Flickr it gave him an intrusive cookie screen and he refused to accept any of it, fair enough. I contacted Flickr support and asked why they had such an intrusive cookie message when sharing a private album link. They wouldn’t budge on it even when I pointed out I was a paying customer and wanted a more streamlined experience to share albums.

So what I do for my friend is put them on Amazon Prime photos - you can share an album link from that and there is none of the cookie nonsense, it just works! If you pay for Amazon Prime you have unlimited Prime Photos storage so that is another option as they have apps too. They search facility for keywords is not that great compared to Flickr though.

Bill

[MJ224]

Flickr works for me, on the IPhone anyway. Very handy when you have internet to show friends etc.

I have made a QR code for our Hendy Nature Trail link. Unsure how successful that is, I think a user might have to jump a hurdle or two to get it to work....must check that...

[gazza95]

Own hosted .me domain with various sub domains for jalbum “websites”.

simple to setup and avoids Flickr, Facebook, Google restrictions. When I sort it out will be able to sell prints as well.

gary

[Ian]

Own hosted .me domain with various sub domains for jalbum “websites”.

simple to setup and avoids Flickr, Facebook, Google restrictions. When I sort it out will be able to sell prints as well.

gary

Can you search for images using auto-tagged key words?

Ian

[gazza95]

Not in simple jalbulms predefined structure I mainly use.

there is however a gallery app I setup to do selling where you can search on metadata. This works by creating automatically a database from a gallery tree.

gary

[Graham_of_Rainham]

I mainly send pictures from my iPad/iPhone to a 4K TV with “AirPlay”

[Phill D]

That is a great question Ian. I'm pretty much in the same situation as you except I've just relented and paid for extra Google storage! Printing is the only way I've shown off any of my best shots and I've not done any prints for ages so the responses here will be really useful.

[Ian]

I may not have explained this well enough! Takew the example - I have my phone or tablet and I would like to find some of my previously uploaded photos to show by using search terms like, for example, shots taken in Suffolk last December, or show shots of my dog in March 2025, etc.

I looked at the Flickr Android app and I couldn't see how to search my own library - only the entire Flickr database.

Ian

[gazza95]

Ian, is Suffolk in Metadata or are you seeing app to work out Suffolk from GPS data?

[Ian]

Ian, is Suffolk in Metadata or are you seeing app to work out Suffolk from GPS data?

I shouldn't have to manually enter tags like this to the metadata, unless there is no GPS data. And AI might even ID some landmarks there.

Ian

[gazza95]

OK understood. Just no answer to that question