Online Private Photo Sharing

A friend of mine, a new mom who is very tech savvy and comfortable socializing and sharing info on the web, recently raised a good question for young parents. Like lots of first-time parents, she put images and videos of her child with her name on the web for friends and family to see. She used Flickr and Yahoo! Video, which makes it easy to send links that people can click on and be brought immediately to a public photo or video gallery.

But when she did a search on her daughter's name, she was surprised to immediately find links to the images. It made her stop and think about how they handle their child's images on the web before she is old enough to have any say in how she is presented online. For now, she has taken the most prominent links down, and she and her husband have decided not to use their daughter's full name on anything they post in the future. Friends of theirs take an even more cautious stance: they will not put any images of their children on the web before they are old enough to say whether they want them there or not.

Either way, it's an interesting dilemma for parents who have come of age at ease with sharing images and writings about themselves on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and other social-networking sites. But when it comes to children, parents need to weigh their kids' right to privacy with the desire to share their joy with the world.

When Richard M. Smith, an Internet security consultant based in Boston, searched on his grandson's name, he was surprised to come upon a page of Flickr photos of the baby set up by his son-in-law. "Seems like a problem," he wrote in an email message. Because Smith is concerned about safety as well as privacy, he notes that putting full names of family members online is not a good idea, especially when there are tools that allow people to search on names of adults and come up with home addresses.

If you've set up a family web site, Smith notes that you can use a ROBOTS.TXT file to tell search engines to go away so the site does not show up on search index pages.

The simpler solution, he said, is to choose web-based photo-sharing options that allow you to keep the sharing between family and friends and not in the public domain. With that in mind, here are a few ways to share in a less public way:

Privacy settings: Flickr now has a "hide your photos from public searches" feature in the "my account" section of the site. You can also change privacy settings to restrict those who view your photos to friends and/or family. If you do this, you'll need to invite some friends and family to sign up on Flickr, which may take a little explaining for some less tech-savvy family members. (Note: You can not make uploaded videos to Yahoo! Video private.)

Private photo and video sharing sharing: All the major photo web sites have sharing features, though many require the viewers to register with the sites to see the photos. Shutterfly does not, which is one of the reasons why I like it. To share videos with family members and friends, try Motionbox, which has a private setting, and One True Media, which allows you to share videos on a personal TiVo channel.

Family social networking sites: Some charge subscriptions, some are free. A few free ones worth checking out are Famoodle, FamilyRoutes, and Kincafe. For a scrapbooking approach, try Smilebox.

Those are a few ideas for sharing photos and videos of your family with the people you want to see them and not necessarily anyone who finds them on the web. If this is something you've given some thought to, too, please share in the comments below how you share images of your little ones with an eye toward privacy and safety.