Know Who's Peeping Your Pics - 11-19 - 11-25

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by MediaSmartHome Team November 18, 2008 11:00 PM

Categories: Networking and Remote Access Computers and Laptops

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Grab a stack of photos from your last family vacation, then flag someone down on the street and hand them over. What? You would never do that? Sound a little too crazy? Well guess what... people do it every single day.

Think about it. Uploading your most personal photos to a photo sharing service isn't really any different than giving a random stranger your vacation pictures. First of all, you put a log of faith into the service by expecting your digital memories to stay secure. Second, if you don't take advantage of the privacy options available to you (if available at all), anyone with a web connection... even strangers, wackos, psychos, and weirdos alike can browse through your personal pictures. Can't you feel they're googly eyes peering at you?

Fortunately, the HP MediaSmart Server can help.

Photo Webshare is a new way of managing and sharing photos. Not only does it give users the ability to upload and share pictures to anywhere with an Internet connection, but it also ensures the photos are stored safe and sound on a device inside your own home (instead of on a web site somewhere). Having it on the household network means that uploads from systems on the household network take place at local network speeds. It’s also simple – Grandma can access it from anywhere with just an Internet browser. Further, the Webshare manager can designate who sees what – for example, preventing friends from seeing personal family photos.

Most importantly, Photo Webshare can keep your photos safe and secure, and away from the gazing peepers of peeping peepaholics.

To Enter:

Express Your Media'Smarts' by telling us about a time when a less than flattering or embarrassing photo that you really didn't want anyone to see ended up... seen. Was it printed in the school newspaper? Dropped in the hands of your new special someone? Looked upon by your kids? Uploaded to MySpace or Facebook on accident and seen by the world?

If you don't have a good story to share, tell us how you're currently sharing photos with your friends and family, and how you think Photo Webshare would be better or worse for your needs.

All who enter by 11/25/2008 will be entered in a drawing to win a HP Digital Camera and a MediaSmart Home polo shirt! All who enter here before the grand prize drawing will be entered to win one of the two prize packages. Post to each contest thread by the end of the promotion, and that's 10 chances to win!

Week 5 Winner

The week 5 drawing winner of an HP Digital Camera and a MediaSmart Home Polo shirt is...

SW!

Congratulations to our week 5 winner.

The weekly drawing may be over, but don't forget to enter here and every week until the big grand prize drawing on December 31st. Enter in each of the weekly drawings and that's 10 chances to win the grand prize!

See the "Express Your Media'Smarts' Giveaway" for full details

Learn more about the MediaSmart Server

Visit Blog

We hope that you're as excited to win the contest are we are to see your entries. Check back every week for a new scenario to test your MediaSmart Server expertise, and to jump on your chance to not only win the weekly drawings, but also be eligible for the grand prize! See the contest rules for more details!

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Discussion: Comments 1-25 of 37 | Latest Comment | 1 2 Next »

DrGerm

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member since: 10/25/2008
rank: 481 of 6697
location: United States
5 forum threads started
17 comments

November 19, 2008 9:07 AM updated: November 19, 2008 9:15 AM

Personally, I haven't taken the time to use Photo WebShare. I have about 10,000 photos on my WHS and it would take way too much time (in addition to duplicating all that disk space!).

I think a much more elegant solution would have been the ability to set file level properties to images in the //Photos/ share and have WebShare directly access images from there. That way, whether you add photos through good ol' copy/paste on the LAN or through the WebShare - the end product is transparent, and, you aren't storing two copies of every single image on your server!

I would also like to have seen a little more functionality from WebShare; I could be wrong since I've barely used it, but I don't think you can do simple things like tagging and adding comments from within webshare.

Personally, I find WebGuide to be a little more promising; but this fails in a different way: Everything is available to all who have access... and it is also lacking in the "functionality" realm. I feel that I just can't win on this issue and am anxiously awaiting someone to make a nice third party add-in...

Just my two cents.

Server: HP EX475 (3TB - 2GB RAM)
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Chris Miller

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member since: 10/28/2008
rank: 5741 of 6697
location: Chicago, United States
10 comments

November 19, 2008 9:10 AM

I don't know if I personally have been the victim of a bad picture posted. I do know, however, that I've been a perpetrator of such mischief. I once got my hands on a photo of a college friend, passed out with a tower of empty mountain dew cans stacked carefully on her forehead. That photo mysteriously found its way into a slide presentation I was giving where I knew her parents would be in attendance. :) Had she been able to secure that photo on a MediaSmart, she easily could have avoided such an embarrassing moment in front of her parents. But really, what fun would that have been? :)

JohnBick

Member

member since: 05/05/2008
rank: 2 of 6697
location: Dutchess County, NY, United States
23 forum threads started
1098 comments

November 19, 2008 9:29 AM

I have used Photo WebShare (and still do) but find it cumbersome. I have recently been posting pictures in using the WHIIST server and am beginning to experiment with the use of ASP.net.

Photo WebShare does not have a very convenient user interface. What is needed is a change to allow it to point at a specific sub-folder in the Photos share and allow read-only access to that folder. (Uploads, if authorized, could be stored in a different sub-folder.) Also the authorization of userids is very cumbersome. This needs to have some way to copy/paste a (long) list of users rather than having to do it manually, one at a time.

Too bad, in a way, as this could be a very valuable HP extension to WHS.

...JohnBick

clynsg

Member

member since: 11/19/2008
rank: 5375 of 6697
1 comments

November 19, 2008 11:25 AM

I know that several family members use Webshare, but I have not myself. I am much more the recipient of pictures than the sender, so don't have any stories of photos appearing in the wrong place.

Brigi

Member

member since: 11/19/2008
rank: 5374 of 6697
4 comments

November 19, 2008 11:32 AM

I am one to immediately toss out any unflattering or, what I consider to be embarassing picture of myself; unfortunately, my control only extends to those pictures that are in my personal possession. My parents had an old slide of me as a very young child with my back to the camera but bare-bottomed, which I always hated. My own father deposited this embarassing image of me into the evil clutches of my husband, who promptly displayed it to everyone....ughhhhh. To this day, he still has it. Hidden away, but ready to use at a moments notice. On the flip side, I'm the designated family "keeper of the photos" and oh, the embarassing photos I could share!

Martin

Member

member since: 09/16/2008
rank: 12 of 6697
location: Louisville, KY, United States
2 forum threads started
86 comments

November 19, 2008 12:57 PM

I use the webshare, curently. I am more or less happy with it. I have most of my photos opened up at a Photo Album level to anyone with a login to the site. However, I have pictures from a bachelor party that - *Ahem* - We won't discuss those pictures. Suffice it to say, they are controlled much more strictly than the others.

My one real complaint with the webshare is that the image size is not customizable. I have a beautiful panoramic shot taken on Tortola that you just cannot appreciate on the webshare. However, if the user downloads it, they get the fullsize image.

-Martin

EX475 + 5TB, 2 GB mem, LE-1640, External DVD (USB)
PC's: Vista64 Biz, Vista Ultimate (32)
Laptops: Vista Home Premium (32), XP Home SP3
Network: DLink DIR-855

View unverified member's comment - posted by twi

agordon10

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member since: 11/13/2008
rank: 5453 of 6697
5 comments

November 20, 2008 9:14 AM

I don;t have one, but I have been using email to share my photos.

phloyd

Member

member since: 11/05/2008
rank: 684 of 6697
2 forum threads started
19 comments

November 20, 2008 10:51 AM

Oh, yes. A trip with the guys to the islands for graduation a number of years back. The shower was a garden shower, just in the edge of the room, with no wall and no door, just a door to the rest of the room that you could not lock. One of my friends that had imbibed just a little too much decided that it would be a good idea to stick the camera around the corner and take a picture of me showering. I never saw the picture (and hope it has been destroyed), but was told it was developed and seen by several. Hopefully, my friend has better things to do than hold onto that picture and I hope it has long been destroyed. Thank god that was in the budding days of the internet before any of us knew how to publish or share photos via email or the internet. Whew.

dirkomatic

Member

member since: 11/17/2008
rank: 870 of 6697
1 forum threads started
10 comments

November 20, 2008 2:47 PM

I don't use the webshare on my HP server. If it had a way of displaying what was in the Photos share without having to upload from a browser, I might use it. As it is now, I don't share digital photos with many outside my family and we print pictures we want to look at often.

I store our pictures on the server and view them on our TVs using media players, but we don't do that too often. Mostly, if we share them, it's via e-mail.

Jennifer

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member since: 11/05/2008
rank: 5566 of 6697
7 comments

November 20, 2008 5:30 PM

We would primarily use the home server to store pictures and to share with our family and friends. There are some pictures we would only want our family to see as opposed to friends. Also, if we take a trip with some friends we can choose for just those friends to be allowed to see. We like the idea of being able to control who views the different pictures.

vickieb

Member

member since: 11/11/2008
rank: 5482 of 6697
8 comments

November 21, 2008 8:44 AM

I haven't had any really embarrassing photos taken, just some lousy ones. Luckily, those pictures that have been really bad, I've been able to destroy. I've just recently set up an account on Shutterfly using their share site feature to share photos, but it would be much better to share from a server I control

candt

Member

member since: 11/05/2008
rank: 5565 of 6697
3 comments

November 21, 2008 2:17 PM

Personally I try not to post to many pictures on media sharing sites like flickr etc. I do however use a windows home server to share photos with my family and friends and love it. They can log into the server securely from anywhere in the world and view them as a slide show or choose which ones they like and order prints directly from my server. It's an awesome solution that I don't know how I could live without.

jimboha

Member

member since: 11/17/2008
rank: 1669 of 6697
5 comments

November 21, 2008 2:56 PM

Fortunately, no embarrassing photos of me ever leaked beyond my control. To my knowledge.

The member of my (wife's) family have been posting and sharing photos at some web site, but I have never been too thrilled by it. Between the possible lack of security, the ads we must endure, and what-not, I just don't like it.

I have an HP MediaVault which I only just recently made accessible via the web (HTML). It is an older MV which doesn't have the Photo Webshare s/w - which I would live to use. So the photos are all just on a web-exposed share and require good filenames to explain what they are. At least now I can try to have our family put our photos on a place that I can manage. But it would certainly be nicer to use a real photo web-sharing app.

Jim

View unverified member's comment - posted by floann

paints

Member

member since: 11/14/2008
rank: 5441 of 6697
4 comments

November 22, 2008 8:42 AM

My coworker keeps hanging an unflattering picture of me in the breakroom. I get rid of it, only to see it pop up again. Quite the mystery.

Bortone

Member

member since: 11/12/2008
rank: 5468 of 6697
location: Richmond, United States
2 comments

November 22, 2008 10:11 PM

I am a collage student who takes pictures like most people breath. I have a collection of about two thousand pictures from the last 6 years. Back before I had a MediaSamrt, I used to store all my pictures in zip archives, then to DVD disc. As you would guess, this setup was for the birds. The worst was when I would lose one of those, all important DVD's with untold thousands of images. Once I got my hands on the HP MediaSmart, I began to use the webshare and have had my digital image collection revolutionized. The best part is that a good portion of my collection are images saved from various places, that I use to build web pages, and with easy http access to my collection I can buid web pages with my personal images anywhere in the world, no problem. When I stop to think about all the ways this Home Server has changed my life, all I can say is that I love this machine!

NormaRae4o

Member

member since: 11/23/2008
rank: 5350 of 6697
2 comments

November 23, 2008 1:19 AM

I don't know if there are any unflattering pics of me out there in cyberspace. I don't use WebShare, but sounds like something I could really use. I am the one who takes the photos and puts them in photo stories and onto dvd to mail out to family and friends.

Some times I do upload them in e-mails which is quicker. I would have to try Photo WebShare to have any kind of opinion about it.

slehan

Member

member since: 11/23/2008
rank: 5338 of 6697
3 comments

November 23, 2008 3:11 AM updated: November 23, 2008 3:13 AM

When I was in high school, my sister found a picture of me as a baby, naked on a bear skin rug. I was mortified. Now I just think it's a cute picture. Thanks for the contest.

paulagirl

Member

member since: 11/02/2008
rank: 5627 of 6697
2 comments

November 23, 2008 9:43 AM

I actually want to learn how to share pictures with friends and family. I'm still in the stone age with a regular 35 mil. camera.

charlie.bravo

Member

member since: 11/23/2008
rank: 5342 of 6697
location: United States
1 comments

November 23, 2008 2:42 PM

I have never put pics on a photo sharing service online & I never will. I don't like the idea of anyone being able to look @ my information (even tho they are only pictures) The HP MediaSmart Server is a brilliant way of sharing information w/ friends & family.

sforeman00

Member

member since: 11/23/2008
rank: 1052 of 6697
1 forum threads started
2 comments

November 23, 2008 3:03 PM

I don't necessarily have a time to share but what I would like to comment on is the ease in which I can setup an area to share photo's with family using the MediaSmart server. I have been looking for an easy way and secure way of doing this.

susan1215

Member

member since: 11/24/2008
rank: 5330 of 6697
6 comments

November 24, 2008 4:29 PM

I share photo with family and friends just by sending then via email, that way I know they are the only ones getting them. I would be open to using Photo Webshare as a more advanced way to share pictures. It's nice that it's easy to use, as my Mom and myself aren't very tech savy.