This weekend I got back from a family vacation and found that when I got back to my computer, my inbox was filled with pictures of the vacation– despite facebook, flickr, instagram, and all the other social media tools around, my family finds it easiest to share photos via email. And who could blame them? It’s simple, and they’ve been attaching things to email for years. We already use a mailing list for emails to the family, and that’s easier to maintain than your circles/friends-list/whatever.
But down at the bottom of an email, one cousin chimed in:
Why can’t we set up a flickr account to upload pictures to so we can see them all in one place?
That got me thinking. What if I set up something to capture all these photos sent via email, and put them into a single photo album? I have a lot of Picasa storage available, so that’s what I’d prefer to use. A quick google found that Picasa supports email upload but it doesn’t allow you to default them to a single album, and I didn’t want family pictures showing up in the wrong place.
So, after a solid day of tinkering, I created email-to-picasa. It’s a webapp that allows you to upload photos via email and have them be stored in a specific album. Add that email to your distribution list, and bam: all photos send to the group are automatically uploaded!