OT: Your favorite photo & video sharing platform (that allows restricted access)

[FastforaSlowGuy]

My wife and I just adopted a beautiful baby girl, and we are looking for an easy way to stay in touch with a very large birth family (think 14 aunts & uncles). It's a pretty open arrangement so we will be in direct contact, but I want to maintain control over who has access and what gets posted. I also want to keep it separate from my own FB account.

FB has a minimum age of 13, so no go. Instagram has a max of 15" video and the privacy controls seem weak. Suggestions?


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[carpediemracing]

I think YouTube has some restricted access type thing. You can name up to x number of people that can view your clips, if you choose to restrict it to users. By making each family a user? you could have a number of families view/post. Or if you have just 14 people for access then you give them all individual access.

Also Skype? You can share a video or file with the other people on the line and you can have conference calls. 14 families would tax any connection but if you're doing 3-5 at a time then you can directly send them video or pictures or they can take pictures or video of whatever is going on.

Not familiar with Google+ or any other networking app.

[weisan]

Vimeo.com offers that.

[veloduffer]

I use Zenfolio for photos and vid. You can password protect specific galleries, as well as restrict access to only specific email addresses. It's a site used by professionals for keeping separate galleries for their clients (weddings, high school seniors, boudoir).

You can also customize the look of your home page and each gallery. You can allow or disallow downloads, and even restrict the size of the download. Viewers can also order their own prints directly from high quality professional labs like Mpix.

There's a free version and and a couple of pay options that are quite reasonable.

[rugbysecondrow]

What I did with my children was setup a gmail account with email, in their names. I periodically send them emails, thoughts etc, and I will turn it over to them someday. The idea being that they would have a chronology letters I send them and A) they might think it is neat to read and B) in the event something ever happened to me, they would know me a little. To coincide with this, you could have a Google drive with privacy restrictions that you could share photos, videos etc. There isn't a comment feature, but I am not certain if that is necessary. You could manage the content and the members.

I could use a Facebook account, the make it private and not allow sharing. You will be the one managing it, so I think you age restriction wouldn't apply.

Best of luck and congrats on the baby! How wonderful.

[bking]

smugmug.

i've been a fan for about 7 or 8 years i think. i've got over 20k photos uploaded. i like everything about it and the folks who run it.
some years ago i paid a daughter to go through all the old boxes and albums and scan and uploaded them to the site. My kids (4 now married with kids, 2 still in the hunt) are on the site regularly. Very cool to have 30 plus years of history there anytime we want to view it.

i also have them send me a disk every few years of everything on the site so i have multiple locations/copies of our photos/film. pretty cheap to do it.