Use an Album Like a Distribution List for Pictures

Distribution lists are a handy concept that go back to the days of inboxes and buck slips. A single copy of a magazine could be circulated to all managers by attaching a buck slip with the names of everyone who should see it.

Today’s digital world, we’re used to distributing pictures using group chat on, iMessage, WhatsApp, or similar groups. They’re great because you don’t have to remember everyone’s email address, but they also create confusing mess of photos in all sorts of different places. It’s hard to remember where anything is, and whether you should risk deleting it to defend your storage budget.

With Ponga, members can create any number of albums for any purpose including as a distribution list. They also don’t have to worry about image file sizes or storage limits. Since one picture can be in any number of albums, you can put the same picture in one album as a part of an organization structure, and another as a way to share it to a specific of people. By putting names to faces, we’ll automatically organize your collection of picture by person. You can create albums to share select pictures with cousins on one side, another set to share with cousins on the other. Albums are a great way to control what’s shared with whom — and add a little curation.

To get started, create an album, name it for the purpose, “Harger Cousins” for example, then add all of the email addresses you have handy for your cousins. Ask around, you’ll probably have your cousins suggest more. Boom 💥, it’s private and everyone has access, everyone’s notified as comments are made and they have control themselves to manage their notifications.

If some of your cousins are also Ponga members, they can add pictures to your albums — if when you add them you give them “can edit” access. If you’d prefer to restrict access, change the setting from the default to “view only.” With that setting, they can only view pictures and cannot add to them, nor can they add pictures to the album.

Because honestly, after a while it’s hard to keep up with all of the cousins—much less their email addresses.