Best way to get pics over internet for montage
 

In your opinion, what's the easiest way for a client to upload 100 pictures to the internet and not have them lose quality or size?

First you have to define pictures, quality and size.

Are we talking about digital stills that are already in .jpg, .tif or other common format?

Or are we talking about hard-copy prints that the customer will need to scan first?

If so, what size prints... 3x5, 4x6, 8x10? Should the customer scan them at 150dpi, 300dpi, etc.?

What kind of presentation are they going into... HD video? web site? Standard definition DVD?

For simple file transfers: yousendit.com/dropsend.com. Have them put all pix in a folder and zip them so they only need to transfer one file.

FTP site??
 

Perhaps see if your ISP provider will allow for an FTP site, and allow the customers to upload directly to you....

Hi Chris,

The customer has agreed to scan the photos himself. I assume the pictures are at all different size. The final presentation is on DVD. But again, I'm just curious on customer-friendly solutions people have for getting 100 photos (1-2mb? files) over the web.

Like Oren said, use a website like yousendit.com or sendspace.com which I use sometimes. They are simple to use, just drop them in a folder zip it up and upload.

Sadly I dont think there is a super simple way of trasfering, not easily anyway. You could get them to upload to a facebook or flickr account but that would loose all quality and take ages for you to download. Just get them to use spendspace or yousendit. If they know how to scan a photo onto a PC then its not any harder to put them in a zip folder and upload to web.

For just such purposes I added an uploader page to our website that will allow files up to 4GB in size.

I always ask the clients to scan their own photos. That's too time consuming on my part to scan the photos. Also some of those photos are really valuable I'd rather not risk losing them.

Then I will ask the customer to either burn me a DVD or upload them to my FTP server. You should be able to create a FTP account with your web hosting company to accept files. Then give your customer the user ID and password to upload. If they don't know what is FTP, don't explain but just ask them to mail you a DVD.

I run an ftp server on my computer. Usually it's been pretty easy for a client to log in using a supplied user name and password, and upload as much as they like.

It's been very useful for repeat clients. They each have their own folder, user name and password, and can upload or download whatever is needed whenever they want. The server is always on.

Note that your isp may not officially allow you to run ftp servers, though they often turn a blind eye.

If you have a website, you probably have the ability to add users to your ftp server. You might want to check that out as well. I have a client that does that for me.

see above.

If I was hosting the website, I'd set it up for SSH (SCP) or sFTP. I might even provide a flash or Java front-end to them if the client needed them.

Or, I could just have the client send me a DVD or CD of them files.

I do as much as I can online because it's so much of a hassle for me to get away from my day job to pick up and drop off packages at the post office.

We signed up for an account on Amazon Web Services S3 service that allows us to host unlimited files and transfer back and forth for very, very cheap. I think last month it cost us about $0.25. If you're a little web savvy, you can do this very easily.

Amazon Web Services

As for FTP servers, you really should set one up on a computer on your home/office network for clients to upload to. There are some very easy solutions, such as:

Build a Home FTP Server with FileZilla - Downloads - Lifehacker

The reason you want it at home is because you'll save time from having to download everything the client has just uploaded. Once the client finishes his upload, the files are ready to be edited and added to a slideshow.

Having a pretty front-end web client app would be a nice touch, but this is beyond the area of expertise of most of our forum friends, I would suspect.