TribalPages has added a great new feature: you can now add photos to your new site via Email! It's easy, quick and incredibly flexible. You can find instructions by logging into edit your site and going to the "Send a Photo" and look for the "Bulk Options" link.

In this five-part series of articles, we're going to look at how to make the most of this new feature to grow your family tree site here at TribalPages. In our first installment, we'll show how to enlist your entire extended family to add photos to your site without giving up the control and safety you're used to.

Understanding Photo Email Addresses

To get started, let's take a look at just how our new Photo Email Addresses work.

When we receive an email at your photo email address, we will automatically add them to an Album on your site named "Emailed Photos". If the album doesn't exist, we'll create it. TribalPages will take the Subject line of your email as a Caption for each of the photos you attach, and will set the body of the email as the Description. You can attach any number of photos to a single email and we will save them all, but most mail servers have a limit to the size of a single email message (often 10MB including attachments).

After saving the photos, we will send a notification to both the sender and the owner of the site (if different) with a link to see the newly uploaded photos.

For your protection, you can change your Photo Upload Address at any time by changing a simple four digit PIN. This allows you to "recall" permission you've granted to upload photos from others. (For example, you may only want to enable uploading during a family reunion!)

Calling in the Troops

You know they're out there: family photos sitting on an aunt's hard drive, or in your sister's shoebox. These are the same people who love your TribalPages site, and who've agreed to help you with your quest. Let's make it easier for them!

First, you'll need to setup a PIN so that the Photo Email Address will work. So, login to edit your site and go to Send A Photo and then choose "Bulk Upload Options". Follow the simple instructions to setup your PIN. For this example, we'll assume we're using my test site, and that I've set the PIN to 1234, so our Photo Email Address will be binkofree-1234@tribalpages.com.

Next, we need to provide that email address to all of our potential helpers. So, let's write up some text that we can email out to our friends or add to the front page of our site.

As you are all probably aware, we've been making great progress putting together our family history on our TribalPages site at http://binkofree.tribalpages.com. We would really like to thank everyone for all of their input and help.

Today, I'd like to invite all of you to get involved directly by adding your own family photos to the site. They'll be available right away, and we'll be notified so that we can check them and link them to the right names!

It's really easy: just send them in an email to binkofree-1234@tribalpages.com just like you'd send pictures to your friends. TribalPages will grab the pictures and add them to an Album named "Emailed Photos". You will get a confirmation, and we'll be notified of the additions so that we can link them to the right people in the tree and tweak the Captions and Descriptions.

We plan on keeping this option open for the time being, so feel free to add any great photos you find going forward. We really love the fact that all of our family can get involved in building our tree, and we want to thank you so much for the great pictures you'll add.

Thanks!,
Bill

Your new recruits send in their snapshots

With any luck, you'll have your family sharing photos with you in no time. How will that work? They'll just email photos using their favorite email program (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, AOL Mail -- even webmail sites like Yahoo! Mail and GMail will all work).

Here, we see an email being sent to our site using Thunderbird:
Notice that the Subject is "Mary Smith" and the body of the message starts with "This is a picture..."? Those are entered by your family members, but TribalPages will set those as the Caption and Description of the photo automatically.

Handling your Submissions

Every time anyone sends a photo to your site, you (and they) will get a notice that a photo's available. It will have a link to the "Emailed Photos" album as well as information about the pictures sent and who sent them. When you get one, go to your site and look in the Emailed Photos album. There, you can edit the pictures as normal.

In the picture above, we're editing the photo sent above. Notice that the Caption and Description are set from the original email. That might not be exactly the text we want, but it's a good start. Also notice the year is set to 2001. TribalPages will do it's best to figure out the year of the photo based on the embedded information digital cameras (and scanner software) put into the file. However, that's sometimes not possible

Handling Rotten Apples

In some cases, your Photo Email Address may get forwarded to someone in your family who you don't want to be able to add photos. Maybe they put up something inappropriate, maybe they don't understand that you don't want every photo they have: it doesn't really matter why. The question is--what can you do?

Well, all you have to do is change your PIN. That will change your Photo Email Address, and you can send out the new address to the people that you do want sending in photos (with a stern warning not to share it with the kill-joy!).

As an example, if we changed our pin to "9128", it would change our Photo Email Address to "binkofree-9128@tribalpages.com". If your troublemaker sent email to the old address, "binkofree-1239@tribalpages.com", it would not be allowed. They would get back a note saying that the PIN was invalid: the photos wouldn't be saved, and we wouldn't be bothered with a notification.

A great start... now what?

Now that we have the hang of this Photo By Email idea, let's use it to really make our lives easier. Our next installment will show how this simple addition lets us manage our family photos with ease using Picasa.

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