Camera Phone photos to the Web

  • Thread starter Der Alta
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Der Alta

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DerAlta
Here's the deal. I take photos with my camera and email them to my office. Often. Like 5-6 times/day.

I work for a General Contractor, that is technologically illiterate. Seriously, illiterate. As in the office still uses webmail, simply because noone knows how to use a Pop3 based system. The maximum space for any email account is 5 meg. So if I email 5 pics, and three other Coworkers do it overloads the email system.

I know there are ways that I can snap a pic with my camera phone, and email it to an email address (at my own site) and it upload automatically to a website.

Would I be best using something like pixelpost in a blog, or should I be using something different?

Thoughts, ideas, possibilities?

I'm looking for something fast, easy and simple.
 
Look at people like ImageShack, Flickr and SmugMug, to see if you can configure an album to do this. I use Photobox as my print provider, and they accept MMS messages, placing them automatically in my "Mobile Uploads" album. Whether that can be shared or not, I don't know, but the specifics would be particular to the provider. Remember that MMS messages are downsized from the full resolution.

Upon further examination, Photobox allows you to e-mail your photos in directly, but the placement into your account depends upon your sender address, which means you may well not be able to send from multiple phones.

If you wanted to do the whole thing automatically, in-house, you'd need better facilities than you have. Basically, you'd need to script something that read the inbox, grabbed the attachment, and dumped it to disk on the web server. Obviously, you'd need some logic to make sure that it only did certain types of file, and only from certain senders. Then you'd have the web application scan the directory, and show the pictures. You could do on-the-fly thumbnailing as well if you wanted.

But from the picture you're painting, that would be too complex. Check out one of the online photo printers, and see how you get on.
 
Text America comes close, but not quite.

I have my own website, and can easily setup a seperate email address for which I'd send the images. I've got my Q which shoots the pics and can email the images.

I've located a few scripts that come close but I've baffled by the Jargon and sequence of installing the script. I'm basically doing this to make my life easier and prove that I can do it. I know my wife would like a similar set-up for her as well.

I'm not necessarily looking for an image Gallery (I've got Coppermine,
ExhibitEngine, Gallery, Gallery2, IPG, Plogger, RatedImages,
SimpleViewer, Singapore, and ZenPhoto for current choices) and I'm not necessarily looking for a Blog. Something kinda inbetween.


Thanks for looking and the possibilities, and Ideas are certainly still open.
 
Have you considered Facebook? I know it's not the most obvious choice, but their mobile uploads feature is dead-simple to use, and you can even give the boss a public link to your Mobile Uploads album. Of course, you may also want to create a Facebook network for your company so everyone can see and share images with each other. The site can't get much easier to use so even your boss may feel comfortable signing up.
 
Facebook uses MMS images, which aren't of high enough quality for what I'm thinking.

http://www.shozu.com/ from the Lifecam project looks interesting, and might work. Although it utilizes a software system loaded onto my Q, which I'm trying to avoid.

I've already got a Photoblog loaded onto my website, so that is easy enough.

Thanks for all the input. It has opened up a handful of leads for me.
 
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