Mrs. Lemon, Los Angeles/Monterey
Age and Occupation in 06: 26, Graduate Student (Public Policy)
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 29, Environmental Consultant
Engagement Date: April 7, 2006
Wedding Date: July 7, 2007
Venue: Rosary Chapel & Monterey Marriott, Monterey, CA
About Me: My FI and I met online, but we like to tell people that we met at a "cookie shop" which is the technical location of our first encounter. He proposed exactly 1 year, 1 month and 6 days after our first date (it's the only part of his proposal speech that I remember), and we're planning long-distance from Los Angeles for a July wedding in my hometown of Monterey, CA. I have a passion for all things "cool, cute and quirky" and I enjoy video games, reading blogs (WeddingBee, trashy celeb, consumer & political) and crafting in my spare time, if I have any!
Collecting Non-Pro Photos
August 30th, 2007 @ 5:09 pm by Mrs. Lemon
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.
39 Responses to “Collecting Non-Pro Photos”
Hi Miss Lemon, thanks for this post - my fiance and I were JUST talking last night about how to make an accessible online album for the pictures our friends and family might take at our October wedding.
Does Flickr have a purchasing option if people wanted to buy a print, or is it for high-res display only? How would one go about printing out a picture they liked from the Flickr set?
This is such a great idea and sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.
Thanks for this post, Mrs. Lemon! I am definitely going to want to figure out a way to get everyone’s pics, so this will be perfect!
Fantastic idea!!
I love the flickr pro account. I have one too.
We will be in the same location as our guests for a couple of days and are being brazen and asking them to upload pictures to one of our laptops at the reception and the day after brunch.
We suggested this to my FSIL that got married earlier this year and her and her FI had a laptop out and a “geek” attendant present to offload pictures from people before they left. Sure there were a lot of bunk pictures, but the good ones were there too.
best advice i’ve gotten in a while! what a great idea to get friends to share!
This is a great idea. We wanted to do something similar to this….
I was going to go the CD route but this seems much more convenient. Thanks!!
good idea, mrs. lemon. btw, where did you get you bm dresses. i love the shade of blue that you picked out. compliments the girls really well. and yeah, one of your gms, is kinda cute. i think i have a crush. hehe 
beware of flickr. if you don’t renew your account, they “freeze” some of your pictures and you can’t access it until you renew (read that as “continue to pay for your pro account”). i was only able to access about 1/4 of the overall pics i uploaded in the year i had the pro account when the pro account expired.
Winn — if you don’t renew your account, only the most recent 200 photos are shown… and if you renew all of your photos are back… they’re never deleted. It’s not really a problem for me, since I plan on snagging all of the photos I want long before next July, and I plan on renewing anyhow.
Stephanie — you can order photos online through Flickr, or your guests can download the photos and do with them what they want (print thru any service, etc.) by simply loading the largest photo format and clicking “save as”
leah — The dresses are from J Crew last fall/winter. And who’s the crush on?!?? (crossing fingers for Ivan since he’s the only single guy)
hmmm i already have a pro flickr account…im trying to figure out how to do this, without everyone hacking into all my pictures!
maybe ill just do a seperate one for a year, and snag them before it expires?
mrs. lemon, thats the one!!!
i love flickr!!
i so love that you posted this! i didn’t know you can download from flickr. i think i’ll sign up for the pro acct now.
We’re also doing this!! I got our cards from Vista Print (during one of their free business card promos) and we’ll be using Multiply.com for the photo sharing.
Great idea, thanks for sharing.
Hey Lemon!
We did the same thing but I used Kodak. I didn’t even think of flickr!
Great idea!
Fantastic! We were just thinking about this!
This is brilliant! I am going to recommend this to all of my brides from now on, and I am totally giving you credit, Mrs. Lemon! Thanks for sharing.
What we did was have a friend with a laptop and multi-memory card reader stand outside the door as people were leaving. He then copied photos from their camera onto the laptop, and then later burned them onto CDs for me. This way guests didn’t have to remember to upload photos.
I later then uploaded photos onto Smugmug (our album is viewable at http://narbonne.smugmug.com/Weddings). It’s a paid service, but unlimited storage and lots of really good features. I find it easier to navigate than Flickr, so I figured it would be good for the not-so-tech-savvy guests that might want view photos. Plus, you can order prints, too.
If you want to join Smugmug, use coupon code Ni5TghEDF708Y to save $5 off your subscription!
I stuck with kodakgallery.com, since I’ve been using it for years and have always gotten fantastic prints from it. If your guests are more likely to want prints than files, I’d suggest kodakgallery.
There’s also a sale on this weekend–coupon code LOVE2SAVE gives 25% off your order. I saved more than $46! Don’t try to think about what that’s 25$ of. I know I don’t want to.
i love using picasa to organize my photos on my own computer. i didn’t know that they let you download orginal-sized files? or did you have your guests upload to a single account like you did with flickr?
Your timing is perfect Mrs. Lemon… I saw your post last week and borrowed your idea for my wedding last Sunday. So far, I’ve collected about 270+ photos! Thanks!!
omg, i didn’t know your flickr gets upgraded like that! i’m totally gonna check on it!
awesome idea!! so creative to have business cards printed out!! you go mrs. lemon!
and thanks for linking us up to your flickr! and again, your and mr. lemon are a gorgeous couple!
Mrs. Lemon - I am setting a flickr account up as we speak! How do you change the settings to make some of the pics in the account visible to only you? Also, on the business card, did you put your login and password, or are you able to create a guest login and password?
Thanks!
[…] were some lingering questions over my last Flickr post, so I thought I’d help everyone out by putting the answers all in one […]
Nice…we did the same with the new Snapfish group room. We got over 300 pictures within the first few days…and I ordered many prints from there too.
Thanks so much!!! I had thought about how to get photos from everyone…I considered the passing out CD’s to people…but this is WAY better and now other people will have access as well if they want any pics. You just made my day…and I already have and SBC email so it is FREE!!!!
thanks for the info…never thought about making it a ‘pro’ gallery. looks like i’ll be creating a seperate acct for the wedding from the one i already have!
[…] to Mrs. Lemon’s awesome post on collecting non-pro pics, I was able to sign up for a Flickr account and share the pertinent information with all my friends […]
[…] mess with success? Mrs. Lemon showed us how to collect non-pro photos from our guests via Flickr, and I ran with it. Originally I planned to copy her idea exactly, however, my inkjet […]
Does anyone know if any of these photo sharing sites allow you to create a guest login username & password…so you don’t have to give out your personal one? If not, I guess I will have to create new account just for the wedding…
Thanks!
[…] Mrs. Lemon and Mrs. Cherryblossom utilized photo sharing sites so their guests could upload pics freely. But there are so many photo programs out there that I don’t know which one is best. I want something that is visually appealing with very little ads. I like the option that our guests can order pictures if they would like, but it’s not a must.Here are some Free Photo Programs I found so far…. click on the icon to go to the website. […]
I couldn’t help commenting on this. There is a site that is specifically designed for this. Private, easy to use and all the photos are collected and archived to a DVD at the end of the term. Everyone can create their own private profile so that you know who uploaded what photos, they are automatically sort by Key Events… and much more.
High Res, upload, download and a wedding website builder included. Its free to try.
I posted some reference materials for you that includes ideas and resources for creating photo tags, labels, and stickers for your reception.
Whether you use our service or not, whatever you use, make sure that you are collecting the “high res” originals not capturing them at a photosharing site where they will only allow you to make prints or gifts.
Happy photo collecting!
Question………when you open a new FLICKR account, it also opens a new email account as it’s linked to Yahoo. I’m concerned that someone would abuse the email account since they have the password. Any suggestions……can we just have the FLICR account w/o the email account?
[…] photo-sharing cards that all the Bees made for their wedding guests? Well, maybe not every Bee but Lemon, Cream Puff, Cherry Blossom, Penguin, Flamingo, aaaaaannnnd *pant, pant* probably at least five […]
