Share the (photographic) wealth! Now you can share your orkut photos with whoever you want

It seems like pretty much everyone knows at least one person who loves photography. The orkut team is no different– Navneet, one of the orkut engineers, is absolutely obsessed with taking pictures. Whenever we leave the office, he immediately whips out his camera and starts snapping photos of everything in sight. (I once caught him taking a close-up picture of my left foot– needless to say, I was not pleased.) All of these photos are of course uploaded to orkut, where he invites his orkut friends to compliment him on his artistic prowess. Like any budding artiste, however, our Navneet is constantly seeking exposure to a wider audience. To help Navneet share his "gift" with the world, and to help all of the rest of us stay connected with our friends who don't have orkut accounts, we're excited to announce a new photo sharing feature on orkut. Now you can share your orkut photos with all of your friends who have email addresses, whether they use orkut or not.

Here's how it works:

When you create an album, go to the "share with" drop down menu and choose "only selected friends". In addition to being able to enter the names of your friends on orkut who you want to share photos with, now you can include the email addresses of all of your friends who aren't on orkut as well.




If you decide that you want to share or stop sharing an album that you've already uploaded, just click on the blue "Share Album" button to add/remove whichever friends you want from your "Currently Shared List."



All of the non-orkut friends that you've included in the list will be emailed a special URL bringing them to your photo album. As this is a limited-access orkut page, your non-orkut friends will not be able to view your profile or any other part of orkut unless they join the site.

Keep in mind that non-orkut friends who receive the link to your orkut photo albums can (and, if your photos are interesting enough, probably will) forward it on to other people who may also want to check your photos out. The only way to ensure absolute privacy over your photos is to restrict your album to specific orkut friends, as we showed you in the last blog post.

So, whether you want to share your graduation glamour shots with all of your friends and relatives (even the ones who've never used orkut), or have photos from the party that you threw last weekend that you'd rather limit to just a few people, photo albums on orkut now give you the ability to choose.

As Navneet can attest to, sharing photos is too much fun to limit just to orkut users. So get out there and start inviting all of your friends, family, and coworkers to join in the experience with you!

Source Orkut Blog.

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Photo albums on orkut– the control is in your hands

When I get together with my buddies for a party, we often tend to get a little silly. Whether my friend Vidya starts lip-syncing Beyonce's latest hit or one of the software engineers decides to challenge a product manager to a wrestling match, we always have a great time and end up with tons of pictures. But when I go to upload the photos on orkut, I often find myself in a dilemma. While I'd love to share the photos of the shenanigans that went down at the party with my friends who were there, I don't especially want everyone on my orkut friends list to be able to see them. In order to resolve this issue once and for all, now you can choose specific friends to share each of your different photo albums with.

If you want to customize the privacy settings on a new photo album you're creating, choose the "selected friends" option from the "share with:" drop down menu. Enter the beginnings of the names of your orkut friends, and the system will automatically complete the names for you.

To make sure that your friends know that you've uploaded pictures for them to check out, you can send them a customizable email invitation (look for the checkbox) that links directly to the album. No matter what, your friends will receive an update from you on their home page when you share an album specifically with them.

If you change your mind about who can view any of your existing albums, or think of more friends to add, you can go to any existing album and click on the blue "Share" button. In the box that pops up, you can see who the album is currently shared with and easily grant or take away access.

Now that I have total control over who can see my photos, I'll definitely be posting pictures of a lot more karaoke nights, dance-offs, and impromptu celebrity impersonations soon. You'll have to take my word for it though, because I'm only going to share these photos with my other wild and crazy friends. :-)

As always, we'd love for you to tell us what you think of this feature. Looking forward to to hearing from you!


Source Orkut Blog.

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