I went through this about a year ago. I also did not ant to use Facebook to post our families photos and videos.
I have never used a blogging web site and chose the web site route since I have web site experience. If you do not have web site experience, it is pretty easy to learn.
Google has free options for web sites, hosting and domains that interact with Picasa Web that make uploading personal photos and videos pretty easy.
In order for you to create and update the web site easily, you will need to use Picasa photo editing software and have all of your media in digital formats.
Some of the benefits of this kind of outlet is you have total control of your families data and there many tools to create a great looking web site to impress your family and friends.
Some downsides are, with the power of have total control or no control over who is viewing your web site, some people have reported back to me that they can not access the site. I am not sure why this is but be aware it may not be easy for everyone to access your site. The other down side is the domain is quite long as you will have to use their domain names which can be quite long. But since you will be sending links in email or other written means I do not consider that to be too much of a problem.
The best part of going this route is that all of the software and site are FREE!
Here is what I do to upload new photos and videos and then update our site.
- First I connect my phone to any computer client in my home and it automatically downloads any photos and video to our home server.
- I then start up Picasa and it automatically scans any new media on the server and does face recognition on any faces it finds and applies names to these people.
- I then look at the photos I like, apply tags and captions if necessary and upload them to a new album or albums on my Picasa Web site.
- I then go to our family site on Google Sites and create a Picasa Web Slideshow and connect it to my new album in Picasa Web.
- Save it and it will automatically notify my friends and family that there are new items on our web site.
It takes me about 5 minutes from start to finish.
If you have a android phone and do not care about face recognition you could even have your phone upload the photos automatically to your Google + account and eliminate the first 3 steps of my list.
Check it out. I think you may like all of the tools Google sites uses to create a great site for your family.
First off
hereis a link to a similar of some of the features you can do. This site is a rental we have and I created a site for it using Google Sites.
Here is the Google Sites link.
Here is the link to Picasa
