When you've got a photo to show off, you don't necessarily want to plaster it all over your Twitter or Instagram accounts for the whole world to see. For example, you might want to display a photo of your adorable tot for his grandparents—without giving Facebook the opportunity to record his facial features for posterity. Luckily, plenty of apps will help you share a picture with only a select group of people.
To choose the best method, you'll have to take a few things into consideration, such as the cloud service you already use to store your photos and the technical know-how of the people with whom you plan to share these images—for instance, if your grandparents only have email, then a private WhatsApp chat is out of the question.
Cloud storage services
If you already back up your photos with cloud-storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive, you can use these programs to create shared folders. While select groups of invitees can view and add to the contents of these folders, no outsiders get to access them. This option is simple and effective, but if you exceed your free quota of storage, you may need to pay for more space.
Dropbox excels at sharing folders. Start by creating a folder of the pictures you plan to share. Open this folder in the web interface, click Share folder, and enter other people's email addresses to invite them to join. When they receive your invitation, they can sync the folder to their own Dropbox, if they have an account, or view the pictures in a web browser, if they don't. You get 2GB of space for free, and after that, you'll have to pay to gain more space—1TB of storage costs $100 a year.
Google Drive works along very similar lines. Open a folder in the web interface, click on the folder's name at the top of the page, and choose Share. As with Dropbox, you can invite others via email, and they can then access the folder through their own Google Drive accounts or by viewing the folder in a web browser. Google gives you 15GB, shared between Drive, Photos, and Gmail, for free. If that's not enough, you can pony up for upgrades, which start at $2 a month for 100GB of space.
Windows or Microsoft app fans might prefer OneDrive. From the web portal, go into a folder, and then click Share to let the photo frenzy begin. You'll get 5GB of space for free, and upgrades start at $2 a month for 50GB of room.
What about Apple devotees? Although iCloud doesn't let you share folders in this way, the iCloud Photo Library is another story. Read on for more information about sharing groups of images through dedicated image-storage apps like Google Photos and Apple Photos.
Google Photos and Apple Photos
These apps—Google Photos comes built into Android and Apple Photos into iOS—offer quick and easy ways to share any of your stored images with a small group of people. They make a good option if you already use the services to back up your pictures, and if your contacts use them as well.