Sharing Holiday Memories With Friends Around the World (No Social Media Needed!)

For many people, social media sites are the go-to option for sharing photos from special experiences with the people they love.

However, this isn’t always the most convenient or secure way to go about it, and generally requires everyone to be signed up to the same platform, as well as giving control of your data over to corporations that don’t have the best track record for respecting user privacy.

Thankfully there are other options available, so without further ado we’ll introduce you to photo sharing options that sidestep the likes of Facebook and Instagram.

Embrace cloud storage

For an all-purpose approach, taking advantage of a cloud storage service makes sense. There are lots of options out there, many of which are free to use or come with very minimal fees.

With a cloud storage solution available, you’ll be able to upload images from your holiday, potentially doing so directly from your smartphone rather than needing to transfer them to another device beforehand.

You can then share links to the folders you’ve made with people you want to grant access to, whether you get in touch with friends and family members via email, instant message or SMS.

Harness a dedicated photo sharing platform

There are top quality sites out there which let you share an album for free, giving you complete confidence in the security and privacy of the pictures you upload.

The benefit of choosing a dedicated photo sharing platform over a more general cloud storage service is that you’ll get access to a more focused set of tools for organizing and distributing images.

For instance, you’ll be able to create custom slideshows that can be enjoyed remotely and altered in real time.

You’ll also benefit from having the option to download images stored in your album at their full resolution, with no degradation in quality due to compression.

You can even allow others to contribute to the album, while retaining control over the approval process so that it’s curated down to the ground.

Thus you get all of the convenience and control of sharing holiday memories via social media, with none of the concerns around privacy.

Go old-school with a photo printing service

You don’t have to rely solely on digital methods to distribute holiday snaps to the important people in your social circles.

There are lots of photo printing services available which will let you upload images and have them turned into high quality prints which can then be mailed to any address you choose.

This is not only good for sending out single prints or entire albums, but also gives you other options for how your pictures are put to use, whether that’s as a greetings card, as a novelty t-shirt, or anything else in between.

The one point to make is that it’s worth being more discerning with the photos that you pick for printing than you might when uploading to a purely digital storage solution or online album. Services tend to charge by the print, and there’s no point paying for poorly framed, blurry or unflattering images to be conjured into existence.

Make a group message just for your holiday

This is perhaps cheating a little in that it does require one form of social media to get working, but it’s worthwhile if you want a super-convenient and quick way of sharing images with only a select group of people.

Messaging platforms like WhatsApp are well suited to forming group chats for particular events, and issuing individual images or sending over an entire album’s worth of photos is a breeze in this context, with end-to-end encryption keeping the data safe from prying eyes.

The main downside to doing things this way is that messaging apps typically apply quite a lot of compression to images in order to get them small enough to send efficiently, without overloading their systems or filling up everyone’s phone storage with snaps. And if you’re vacationing without the kids for the first time, the last thing you want is to overdo it on photo sharing.

If you don’t mind the lower quality, then that’s fine. But if you want friends and family to be able to use the images in other contexts, it’s not ideal.

The last word on photo sharing away from social media

Hopefully we’ve proven that you don’t have to suck it up and settle for social media sharing when you’ve got photos that you want loved ones to see.

The last reason to take this route which is worth considering is that the social media market is a fickle one, and it’s possible for platforms which were once riding high to fall from grace. You don’t want your precious snaps to go down with sinking ships, so having a more resilient alternative in place is a wise way to preserve precious memories no matter what happens in the future.