sharing photos on the net

[bwana]

I would like to upload a bunch of photographs to the cloud. For argument's sake, let's say I put up a thousand photos ranging in size from 500kb to 5 meg.

I would like to share subsets of this collection with various groups and individuals.
For example, I would like to select all of john's pix and send him a link to that collection. I would also like to select all of my ski club's pix and send them a link to that collection Some of these pix might also include john.

I would like to present the different collections in different formats. Let's say I would like john's collection to be a collage of all his pix on one page. I might light like the ski club collection to appear as a slide show of individual pix on a dark grey background.

Is there a service that will do this? Easily?

[syncrasy]

First things first (since you posted this question to the DAM forum)...

Do you use a DAM to organize/tag your images on your computer? If so, which DAM? If not, how do you currently organize/tag your images?

[bwana]

DAM=lightroom

[syncrasy]

I'm not a Lightroom user, so this might be like the blind leading the blind. You don't say what you've tried already, so if you want more informed help, you might have to say more about what you already know and/or tried and what you are willing to pay for and/or learn to achieve your goals.

More questions...

Are you familiar with creating web galleries in Lightroom?
Have you researched photo hosting sites (e.g. Adobe Creative Cloud, SmugMug, Picasa/Google +, etc.) and how they can be used with Lightroom?
(For example, see SmugMug: http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93281-how-do-i-upload-from-lightroom-)
Alternately, do you own your own web domain for hosting web sites, and are you familiar/comfortable with coding your own HTML?

[bwana]

Tnx. I was hoping for a web app that could do this so I could share photo subsets on the go (from pc, Mac, android, iPhone) that do not have lr installed. Seems like no one really wants this so it doesn't exist.! Tnx for your help.

[syncrasy]

Are you sure it doesn't exist? What about Zenfolio?

[k bennett]

Any of the online photo services can do this. I have been using Photoshelter for several years. I keep many photos in my account, and share subsets with different groups. These galleries may be wide open, or password protected, or require a login. My account is at kenbennettphoto.com, but all you can view is my portfolio. (Which is out of date. Sigh.) This is the lowest cost version -- Photoshelter offers several plans, and the higher end plans offer more custom options for the look and feel of the page.

500px might work for this, too.

[bwana]

ok, so i decided to use google docs to create a presentation. The images are on google drive. Google docs simply references the images so any number of templates are possible. For example, here are two different 'galleries' made in google docs.

Boston

Boston in Blue

Of course you cant sell the images, it's just a way to present subsets of your images with a circle of friends. The same way that 500pix does with sets, or smugmug does with smart sets.

Except of course, it's free.

[syncrasy]

Very interesting. It seems you found what you were looking for. Other than the lack of e-commerce, is there anything about this solution that doesn't meet your needs?