Who do we like for photo sharing ? Now that MobileMe has evaporated, I have several friends looking for a recommendation. Unfortunately, it's not anything I have experience with.
Doesn't necessarily have to be free -- anything up to $40 per year is acceptable, as long as they do a good job. Need some model of grouping & organising pictures (eg. folders or albums), & some degree of access control per group (passwords would be better than just secrecy). Most common use case would be "here's a link to the album with the pictures of yesterday's dinner party" emailed to the guest list.
Should play nicely with Mac/iPhoto, & should be intuitive enough to not intimidate technophobes.
(Facebook makes me cranky, so that's off the table.)
The users I've got aren't interested in links suitable for twitter, etc, but if it does that well, that'd be a plus.
So, what does the collective experience of The W have for me? Or what other requirements do we need to clarify?
If you're into iCloud (since you mentioned Mac/iPhone), then once iOS6 (and I'm presuming Mountain Lion comes out), they'll be offering shared photo streams (with those outside of iCloud being able to view on the web).
I've never actually used MobileMe, so I'm not certain to what extent you were used to but here's the preview on Apple's site.
If you can put aside your crankiness, Facebook's actually pretty good for free.
If you CAN'T put aside your crankiness, Diaspora* is pretty much tied into cubbi.es, so you could use that and be on an anti-Facebook high horse at the same time. (If you need an in to get a D* account, I can hook you up.)
If you're looking for something that isn't Facebook which people have heard of, there's always Google+, which works well with my Android phone but may not work as well with an iPhone. (Or maybe it does! I have no idea!)
Getting away from sites tied to other social sites, I have heard good things about 500px but I haven't really used it due to its limits in the free version (10 photos/week)
Flickr is still the king if you're paying, not so good if you're using it for free (I believe they still limit you to 200 photos on the free version)
And there's probably others if I weren't going off the top of my head.
Looks like I'm not going to be able to hand out a tidy, "one stop shopping" solution, am I?
For my most technophobic friend, I'm thinking the $25 Flickr. Flickr & Facebook seem to be built into iPhoto on the Mac, so it should be the most seamless. And the model seems like something I can explain succinctly, with minimal weirdnesses.
As I was looking around at wannaberockstar's suggestion about shared streams under iOS6, I stumbled over the "Journal" (apple.com) concept from (the relatively new) iPhoto for iOS. (Not to be confused with the Photos app that came bundled with the iPad/iPhone. And which has a different feature set than iPhoto for Mac. Yeesh.) Theoretically, one should be able to artfully arrange the photos, then publish to a web page on iCloud for sharing with anybody. That might actually work best for the friend who's bonded to her iPad. I'll have to play around with it, but it sounds promising for her needs.
I embrace my crankiness as intrinsic to my personality. However, my very tall horse & I think cubbi.es & Diaspora look very cool -- I'll need to carve some time to look into it! Meanwhile, I might have to play around with the free version of 500px, & see how it really behaves.
If it IS Norton, it would depend on what version you're running. I haven't used it myself in years because of how piggy they used to be about resources. I've heard that the newer versions are much more nimble.