4 ms·
Ask HN: How can my mom share her phone pics and videos with her friends?
Hi!
The best way to share pics used to involve driving to a friend's house with a USB stick [1]. Ironically, this solution does not work any more since most "regular" people own no PCs.
I guess techies have our techniques: mail, upload to Dropbox, upload to "megaupload"-style site, share via flickr...
However, for people like my mom who has no computer, just a smartphone, and no technical knowledge, it's being a nightmare.
She shares pics via whatsapp which is popular within her demographic. However it compresses media, making them unsuitable for printing or viewing in a large screen. Telegram has a "file" mode which allows sending uncompressed pictures but it's kind of difficult to use. If Whatsapp could send uncompressed media by default, I wouldn't be posting this.
Mail is also popular though the size limitations kill it. She is used to manually send like 8 mails with 3 pictures each, which takes her half an hour, and it makes me sad.
Dropbox/icloud is doable for her. The problem is that people who receive the pictures, usually older moms too, can see them on the website from their phones, but it's not easy to transfer them to their phones "camera roll"
Using "megaupload"-like sites is probably a bad idea, too difficult to use and prone to questionable ads which display fake warning banners which can scare them.
HN, what do your moms use to share pictures?
- Easy to share: open photos app, select, "share to", select app
- Easy for other moms to download them to their phones, not just view them online
- Don't require all moms to download a new app. They usually have email and Whatsapp installed, nothing else. However they'd be open to installing apps if they solve the problem completely.
- Multi platform, and mobile, since none of them owns a computer
- It may have a difficult set-up process since I'd install it and configure it myself.
Do you know if something like this exists?
Thanks!
[1] https://xkcd.com/949/
- 64bitbrain 10y agoI dont know if there is any simple way of achieving this. However, I had similar issues with sharing high quality images and whatsapp was not the right app for it. I setup slack for my parents on their phones and they share images and stuff on it. The free tier for slack works for me, and integrated tons of apps like dropbox, kayak and etc to it. But then this is more suited for close group, like in my case.
- niftich 10y agoByte-exact filesharing and 'picture sharing' are actually different usecases. Most people who casually exchange pictures are okay with some amount of lossy compression if they can't visually tell the difference. Since you specifically mention that you're not okay with anything other than byte-exact sharing, this drastically limits your options and automatically excludes certain well-integrated solutions like Facebook. Your other constraints are: [1] Viewers must not be required to download an app they don't already have (ie. in your case Whatsapp and Email) [2] No size limit [3] Downloaded images appear in 'Camera roll', not a 'Downloads' folder Unfortunately, [3] is not possible on Android, as all browsers on Android save to a 'Downloads' folder, not the 'camera roll'; iOS on the other hand doesn't expose folders, so all saved images will appear in the 'camera roll' by default. [1] and [2] are readily offered by sharing on Google Drive, OneDrive, and other cloud providers. Make the file public 'shared by URL' and email/chat the URLs around.