How to share baby photos with grandparents privately

In the first months after a birth you take more photos than in the whole year before. Grandparents want to see all of them, especially when they do not live around the corner. The easiest route is the group chat or a post on social media, and that is also the route where you have the least control: who receives the photos, what happens to them and how long they stay findable.

What grandparents need

When it comes to sharing baby photos the attention usually sits with the sender, while the receiver decides whether it works. Grandparents who do not use apps daily benefit from something different than we do: they want nothing to install, photos large enough to see, and a way to find them again six months later without scrolling through a chat.

At Ohhi there are two ways to do that. Invite someone to an album by name and they get their own account and a notification as soon as new photos arrive. If you want to spare your parents that, turn the folder into a share link instead. It opens in the browser, with no account and no app, on a tablet too. Downloads and originals are not part of it, and you can revoke or refresh the link at any moment.

What to check beforehand

• Who can get in later? With an invitation by name you know exactly who is looking. A share link is open to anyone who receives it, so send it per person rather than to a group.
• Forwarding. A photo you send as a separate file can end up anywhere afterwards. What sits in an album you remove in one go, for everyone who could see it.
• A file holds more than the image. Photos taken at home usually carry the capture location with them, and that is your own address. If you send loose files by email, strip that data first with the free remove EXIF data tool.
• How long it stays. In a chat, photos slide out of view by themselves and a new phone wipes them. An album stays for as long as you keep it.

Chat apps shrink photos when sending them. What grandparents keep is a copy of a few hundred kilobytes, while the original on your phone is a few megabytes.

How we do it ourselves

We use Ohhi within our own family, and the setup that works best for us is a simple one. There is one running album for the little one that gets a handful of photos each week, plus an album per occasion: a birthday, a holiday, the first day of school. The grandparents sit in that running album, so they hear about new photos without having to ask.

What helps is that the roles are separate from each other. Grandparents look and react, while a co-parent or the childminder adds photos of their own. How those roles work is covered in shared albums with roles and reactions.

Setting it up

• Create a free account. You start with 1 GB of storage, enough to see whether the setup suits you.
• Keep it to one album for the baby. A new album every month turns messy on its own, for the people looking too.
• Invite the grandparents as viewers. They see everything and can react, but change nothing about the album.
• If an account does not work for them, share the folder with a link and save it as a bookmark in their browser.
• Add the photos from the past months straight away, so there is something to see when they first look.

That keeps the photos with the people they are meant for, without a public profile and without them disappearing into a chat. The wider consideration is in sharing photos of your kids with only who you choose. And if the group chat stays the place where everything lands, sharing family photos without the group chat helps.