Photo Sharing with Fellow Cruisers

What To Do with All Those Pictures? Part 4

Unless you are diligent about asking others to take your photo with your camera or smartphone, you may not have many photos of yourself on your cruise. I am one of those people who don’t think to ask. So when I got home and put together a photo book of my trip, I regretted that I didn’t have more photos of myself, especially in groups with people I met.

For example, when we were in Ho Chi Minh City, some of us took a “sit-low” (tri-shaw) bicycle tour through the city. I took a lot of pictures and came away with some good ones of members of our group. But I couldn’t manage to get a good selfie.

Now that I am home and have time to review my photographs, I’m preparing to send pictures of cruise friends to those for whom I have email addresses. (I’ll make a plug here for participating in the Cruise Critic roll call’s photo book for your cruise, so you’ll have those emails addresses.) It only takes a few minutes, and I know they will appreciate getting their photos.

Even easier is to share photos during the cruise. You can use a flashdrive, but today’s smartphone apps make sharing even easier.

Apple’s AirDrop and Google’s AirDroid are amazing. You can use these apps to wirelessly share photos (or other files) with anyone else with a similar smartphone in your vicinity.

With AirDrop, you both want to have WIFI and Bluetooth on. You open the photo, tap the icon with the box and upward arrow and select the person to receive the photo. Apple gives more detailed instructions here. The blog photo shows my iPhone screen (with a final photo of the Amsterdam and Oosterdam as I flew out of San Diego).

Google’s AirDroid works similarly. And the good news is that in the last couple of months it has made the feature work between all devices, including Apple products.

As an Apple user, I find AirDrop also is an easy way to move photos between my devices. For this blog, the WordPress app on my iPhone is the easiest way to upload photos. So when I want to use a photo that isn’t on my iPhone (such as one taken with my DSLR camera), I send it to my iPhone to upload.

Before my next cruise, I’m going to brush up on AirDroid and AirDrop and make sure that I share more photos with others in the moment.

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This is the last post in my cruise photos series. I would love to hear your ideas on how to organize, use and share your photos. Please comment so we all can learn.