Best Practices for Managing Family Access to Ponga Stories

Hm, there are SOME limitations to what we can help you with. 😜

Managing who has access is always a challenge when dealing with software. Ponga albums are probably the easiest way to control access since you can invite family to contribute all at once, then not worry about it. Each new picture you add to the album automatically becomes available to everyone.

In that way, albums work a little like tiny Facebook groups. You need to know someone’s email address to invite them to the album the first time. After that they’re in, you don’t have to fuss with it. They’ll get notified of each new picture or comment added. If you own the album (much like being a group administrator) you also get notifications. You can also delete comments made, and add or remove people from the album at any time. You’re in charge and you can ask someone to step outside.

Since Ponga detects and collects faces into albums when you upload pictures, you might choose to share an entire album of pictures of “Grandma Jones” for example, with your parents and siblings. That works for your immediate family and the relatively few pictures you have, but it might not make sense for all extended cousins.

Instead, you might choose to create a special album just for an event or curate an album to tell a story. Consider a wedding, baby shower, or a milestone birthday. Sharing hundreds of pictures at once can be overwhelming to a large group, especially if they all look alike, but if you curate them a little, pulling from other albums to add pictures specific to the occasion, they can be very powerful and bring everyone together.

One Ponga picture can be in any number of albums, so if you share that special picture of Grandma with her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter from her 90th birthday party album, the stories added will be viewable when the same picture is viewed in the albums created from the Gallery view when you put names to the faces.

Have some suggestions for managing families and these Ponga albums? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Drop us a note, we’d love to hear them.