A better way to share photos ...

I take and share hundreds of photos a week. They are all loaded onto the Mac, edited and then distributed using Facebook, email, Twitter, Flickr, various web sites and occasionally on CD-ROM. I also frequently get requests from people to send them the original. All this takes time and there's no easy record of what has been shared with whom. So over the past couple of years I've been thinking about creating a new way to share photos that would be easier for my situation and here's my concept:-

In iPhoto (or any other photo management application) simply tag the photo with the email address (or group name) of the people you want to share it with!

Yes, that's it! That's all you would need to do to share an image with someone.

What happens behind the scenes is more interesting ...

The sharing software makes a regular sweep over the iPhoto library and finds any newly tagged photos with email addresses or group names on them. If then looks up each individual and your preferred method of reaching them (email, Facebook, ...) and it delivers the pictures to them. A management screen allows you to define groups and to manage the list of people with whom you share photos. For each person or group you can define how to reach them (Facebook, Twitter, email, Flickr, web site, CD-ROM, ...) and you can also set a limit on how large a photo to send them and a limit on how many to send per day. Thus for a friend on a slow connection you might chose to only email them a medium sized version and limit it to one per day. They would thus get a daily email from you every day until all the photos tagged with their name (or a group that they belong to) have been delivered to them. It would also enable you to easily set up a photo of the week post to Facebook and to queue up images for future picture of the week posts.

I think this approach would be much easier than my current photo sharing process. Thoughts? Comments?

I also see that a local startup PhotoRocket has announced plans to revolutionize how we share photos. I wonder if there are any similarities between my ideas and what they are planning ... we shall see soon.