I'd like to collect everyone's photos into a high-res shared album.
100 friends/family are joining and we are all staying at a resort for the week. They will be taking lots of great photos during the week!
We will have a WhatsApp group chat. In my experience folks tend to send their photos there, but the image quality is very poor once it's uploaded to WhatsApp.
My two requirements:
1. Should be very low friction for people to upload. No downloading another app.
2. Images/videos should remain in original/high quality
I am willing to pay for a good solution.
Does anyone have any ideas?
My ideal solution would be a bot that you could add to a WhatsApp group chat. Images uploaded to the WhatsApp group chat also get automatically uploaded in their original quality to a shared google album. I don't think this is possible.
If anyone from WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal/etc is reading this, I would pay a lot for a "Pro" account to have high-res photo uploads for my wedding/music festival/travel/etc group chats
Let guests choose which one to upload to.
Do some hourly backend sync between the two. https://www.multcloud.com/tutorials/sync-google-photos-to-ic...
Also, congrats!!
The people I asked for advice said that they'd prefer to download Google Photos to upload/view photos vs. a third-party service that didn't require them to download anything (i.e. Synology photo request).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431743
within the comments, there's people also complaining about losing photos as well. just so you're fully informed
If I had to do it again I would stick to WhatsApp and manually ask to get high res for the best pictures.
One thing we learned is that even though our crowd is tech savvy, we still had to hound people to upload stuff after the fact.
https://www.jrpass.com/blog/say-cheese-the-ultimate-guide-to...
Pro photographers are ideally equipped for some the tough problems in wedding photography (the reception dinner that is poorly lit, large group photos, etc.) but there is going to be a lot of value in gathering and curating guest photos in 2023 and who's in a better place to do it?
I noticed these products
https://www.weddingphotoswap.com/
https://guestpix.com/weddings/
https://weddybird.com/en/photo-gallery
also this discussion
https://www.reddit.com/r/wedding/comments/14mmcqc/best_websi...
It is A LOT of work. You're specifically talking about an event with everyone's mom gathered together. The tech support for a site like this based on the users being targeted is a total nightmare. The simplest tasks are confounding to people. UI/UX definitely has a lot of heavy lifting to do here. This may or may not be the wedding photog's skillset.
The wedding photog has enough on their plate to deal with. I personally would not want them to be asked to provide tech support to tech illiterate family/friends of bridezilla.
(Kinda funny that my photographer friends online tend to automatically discount any software I've developed myself for image processing; a lot of them still think sRGB is the "standard" color space in 2023 despite mobile devices mostly being Display P3 for some time)
vs like in Google Photos, you just hold-select a bunch of photos you already took (and probably auto-synced to the cloud), add them to the shared album... and done! No additional friction and no re-uploading needed.
-----------
That said, I don't know if that's a common enough workflow for your average non-HN, non-power-user =/ It's possible people don't even know that feature exists.
I've also seen some screwiness however so I'll be watching with interest what other people suggest.
If everybody you need is on Whatsapp, I would probably try to create a read-only group (set posting permissions to you only) and let the PHP script share every uploaded photo to the group with a link to upload more.
I have experimented with it as an alternative to Google Photos. It has a great Android app and the web UI is almost identical to Google. It includes facial recognition (it will group your photos automatically by face, but without sending that data to an advertising company!). I'm really impressed by it.
https://github.com/immich-app/immich
I haven't used the photo sharing features but I see it offered in the UI.
It is really easy to try: you can run it using docker-compose in about two minutes.
The only snag I have noticed is that the Android app will often get updated and that will then cause it to not work with the server. I have never had an issue when I just switched to the newer docker tag and restarted, but that's been a little frustrating. I suppose I should just disable automatic updates of the Android app to prevent this.
You first create a file request link and share this link with everyone. They can go to this link using their phone browser (or a browser on any device) and upload files (full high resolution files). Files automatically go into this "request" folder on your account. You can then share this folder out and have it viewable at another link.
You may want to set up couple URL redirections to these two link like mywedding.com/upload and mywedding.com/shared to make things easier and not have people asking for the link 100 times.
Doesn't Telegram allow full-resolution sharing of pictures out of the box ?
Unfortunately, you'll probably get people sharing whichever way they're most comfortable with and have to ask them specifically for originals.
It’s super frustrating.
For building projects, we shared photos and videos with Cluster.
See: https://cluster.co/
It's slightly annoying that it's not possible to set that to default, and I reckon a lot of guests won't remember or bother to change that each time, but it's great to know that.
Park service just put a big sign and called it a day.