Use dropbox to collect wedding photos (or any other group photos) with friends and family

After my wedding, I searched for hours trying to find the easiest way for all my friends and family to send me their digital photos. An FTP server would have worked, but would have been slightly more intimidating to the non-technical folk. I decided that a shared dropbox account was the perfect solution, and it worked out even better than I could have imagined. I received 1900 unique pictures in 2 weeks!!

I created a new account, and sent the following email to everyone who attended:

Thanks so much for making our special day an amazing one! Now that it is over we would love to get everyone's perspective. So, we would appreciate it if you could drop your photos in our dropbox (instructions below).

This is an account that we will all share. This means that you can all check back in a week and download as many pictures as you like, and it also means that you can potentially delete all the pictures everyone else has uploaded… so be careful!

How to upload pictures:

1. Browse to this website: http://www.getdropbox.com/
2. Log in using this username/password combo (login is in upper right corner):
   Username:
   Password:
3. Once you get logged in click on the word Photos
4. If you would like us to know which pictures are yours, create a folder with your name
   ie: Seth's Pics
5. Click on the folder you just created
6. Click the UPLOAD BUTTON
   

There are three ways to upload pictures:

Use the mass upload feature

• This is by far the easiest.
• Click the blue button that says "Choose Files"
• Hold shift and can use the arrow keys to select up to 50 pictures at a time and select "open"
• Then click submit to upload them to the site!
  

If that doesn’t work, you can try the “Basic Uploader”

• This one is much slower because you have to select one file at a time like in most email clients. If the first option doesn’t work, I recommend going to the third.

Install the software package on your computer

• Hit cancel, and then goto the “Install” link on the top right of the page.
• Install the software package using the same username and password from above
• This will create a “sync” folder on your computer where you can just copy all of the files from the original folder to this sync folder. Within minutes they will all upload to the server automatically!
• *** This means that every picture someone else uploads will also automatically sync to your computer, so be mindful that this can eat up all of your bandwidth and/or hard drive space. ***
  

Thanks again!