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 create a free account and get a notification when new photos arrive: as a push notification, or by email if they turn that on. 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; only what someone has already downloaded stays with that person.
• 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 get a notification when something new arrives, via push or by email if they turn that on.

Grandparents look and react. If a co-parent wants to show their own photos too, they share a folder of their own with the family in the same way. How inviting works is covered in sharing an album with family.

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 to the album. They see everything in that folder and can react, but change nothing in it.
• 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.