Best ways to share photos privately with friends and family

Those who often take photos with a camera or smartphone usually publish the most beautiful ones on Facebook or Instagram, so that all friends and relatives on social media can see them. The problem with social media, in general, is that photos are usually visible to everyone unless you set tight privacy. For example, if we take photos of a family dinner, you probably wouldn’t want all friends and strangers to see them while, conversely, the “crazy” photos of a party would be better not to show them to parents, office managers, or other family members…Luckily on Facebook and other sites, it is possible to show the photos to friends and family in private mode, so that only the people in the shot can access and view the photos, without having to publish them anywhere on the Internet. In this guide, we will show you what are the best ways to share photos privately with friends and family, so as to respect our privacy and those of the people in the shot.

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How to share photos privately

All sharing sites allow you to share photos and images with a more restrictive level of privacy, so that only people tagged or to whom we send the link will be able to access the photos, without having to blurt everything out with public profiles.

Share private photos on Facebook

On Facebook you can share photos privately, leaving them to be visible only to some selected friends. When we upload a photo or an album to the Facebook diary all we have to do is change the sharing option present immediately below the username (in the sharing window) and choose the custom mode to write the names of the selected people.

By selecting one of the available options we can choose the people who will be able to see the uploaded photos (you can also write the names of the lists if they have been grouped Facebook friends into lists). This way of sharing photos, however, has a major flaw: each person with whom you see the photo can then re-share the photo with friends or publicly, making every effort to make it private in vain.

Share private photos with Amazon Photos

A great alternative to Facebook to share photos privately with friends and family is to use the service Amazon Photos, accessible from the official website.

With this site we will have unlimited space for storing photos and, with the sharing options, we can choose which people can see the photos, limit the possibility of re-sharing or downloading photos, and sharing entire albums with a few simple clicks. In addition to the website, we can also download Amazon Photos for smartphones and tablets, using the apps available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We talked about Amazon Photos in our guide Best Alternatives to Google Photos, free or with a subscription.

Other ways to share photos privately

If we don’t want to share photos on Facebook or Amazon and we are looking for a private method to send or share photos via the internet we can use other sites or apps that work better.

• Google photo is by far the best app for creating private or shared albums, even with the possibility of involving other people to add images. Unfortunately, it is no longer completely free as it used to be, but it still remains as advantageous as written in the guide for creating shared and collaborative albums with other people.
• iCloud allows you to upload photos online and share albums with other people, also giving them the opportunity to participate by adding more photos. While the app works very well, the flaw is that if you use a free account there is only up to 5GB of space for all photos and videos saved online. On the Apple website, the guide for share photos privately with iCloud.
• OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud that can be used by everyone for free to upload any type of file. The photographs are organized into galleries and you can send the gallery links to other people to show them the images. When you upload a photo to OneDrive it remains in its original size, it is not compressed or resized. If you are using Windows 10, you can use the Onedrive application and see all the shared photos without loading the site, directly from the Start screen. You can access the photos uploaded to OneDrive from virtually anywhere, from a computer or smartphone, through the account.
• 23Snaps is a site and app for Android, iPhone, and Windows that allows you to share photos privately, even of children, so that they are only visible to a small circle of family and friends.
• Cluster is one of the best-known online apps for iPhone and Android for sharing private photos with small groups of people and special occasions. It works very similarly to a standard social network, with notifications, comments, likes.
• Facebook Messenger e WhatsApp is the most famous messaging apps, where you can make groups of people and share photos privately, so you can keep them in the chat (only on Messenger because Whatsapp does not store photos in the cloud). Alternatively, we can always bet on Telegram, where the photos are saved in the cloud and are not lost even if you change your smartphone or use Telegram from a PC.
• Flickr has declined a lot in popularity in recent years and after the sale by Yahoo, it has become mainly a paid service.
• Shutterfly is a different way of sharing photos because it allows you to create small mini photo sites that can remain private. The creation of a web page with Shutterfly is easy and very intuitive, giving the possibility to customize it in graphics and style. Shutterfly is also one of the best sites to go to share private videos that are only visible online by friends.
• Photobucket, the popular photo site, provides a service called Photobucket Stories where you can share photos like in a photo book.
• Imgur is the principal of sites to upload photos on the fly to share on the internet with direct links which can also be used on blogs and forums.

With all these methods we will always know how to share photos privately with friends and family in a simple and effective way, whatever device we use.

Conclusions

Facebook and Amazon Photos are without a doubt the best ways to share photos privately with friends and family, as they allow good privacy control (especially Amazon) and also offer unlimited space for uploading entire photo albums. Alternatives to these two services are not lacking, but in some cases, we will still have to submit to the limited space of cloud solutions or hosting services.
In another article, we saw the alternatives to Google Photos, free or with a subscription

To learn about other ways to save and share photos, please read our guides Save photos and files in OneDrive and synchronization between PCs e cloud storage sites where you can upload files to the internet come to Google Drive e Dropbox.

If, on the other hand, we want to create digital albums online we can continue reading in the guide to sites to create digital photo albums, collages, and photo books to print.