Weddingbee Blog

EDIT:  If you have a AT&T/SBC Internet account, then a flickr.com account is FREE for you!!!  Just sign up for Flickr using your account’s email address and password (ie. @sbcglobal.com, etc.) and your pro access will be free as long as you have an account with them! If you already have a flickr account, simply change the email on the account to your AT&T/SBC account email, and your pro account will be upgraded to pro for free!

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So many digital cameras… so many ways to get them from your friends and family! There is an abundance of websites that make collecting photos from others online quite simple, and it can often be difficult to choose how you’re going to do it. Some people opt to hand out CD-mailers to their guests, while others send email links to picture-purchase sites like Shutterfly or Photostation.

After weighing the alternatives, I opted to ask my guests to submit their photos to Flickr for quite a few reasons:

• I wanted anyone (including myself) to be able to download the photos in the full resolution
• Personalized web address for easy viewing
• Organization tools that let me rearrange the photos into sets and groups as I’d like
• “Privacy” function for photos — they’d still be uploaded and available to me, but not to everyone
• Super easy and reliable uploading tools
• Easy way to upload all of the professional photos for viewing

So, I created an account with an easy login and password for our guests, and quickly paid the $25 upgrade fee to make it a “pro” account to allow unlimited uploads. At the wedding reception, I included the following small business card in everyone’s menu/evening program:

While it took people about a week to start putting their photos online, slowly but surely we started collecting hundreds of pictures. Each person uploaded their photos into little sets online with their name, which made things really easy to organize. I created photo sets like “Rehearsal Dinner” and “Reception (non-pro)” within the Flickr group, and easily extracted the photos from each person’s set that matched the themes. Then… I made all of their uploads private, and all you can see as a guest are the organized little groups.

Now some friends chose to publish their photos online with Picasa (aka. Google) Photo Albums, which was just as handy for me, since you can download the entire albums with a simple click. All I had to do to add them to Flickr was simply upload them from my computer… and I saved them the added task of doing it themselves.

In the end, I’m really happy I went with flickr and I’m sure I’ll be continuing to use their pro membership for years to come… mainly due to the unlimited storage and upload space!

If you’d like to see how well the album organization turned out, feel free to view our Flickr page.