How to share photos with someone else’s Android tablet?

by philg

Folks:

Here’s something that I thought would be easy but in fact seems to be difficult….

A friend has an Android tablet. I want to push photos to a gallery on her tablet. I don’t want her to have to do anything other than open the “Gallery” application on the tablet. I want the pictures to be available when the device is offline. The source of the photos is my desktop computer and the most convenient application from which to share them would be Google’s Picasa.

I’m pretty sure that this would be dead simple on iOS. I would create a “Shared Photo Stream” and then share it with her. Once she accepted it the pictures would just trickle onto her device. Android has a “Google Photos” sync setting that, I think, will sync one’s own Picasa albums but it does not seem to sync any of the albums that have been shared with the owner of the tablet/Gmail address.

I don’t think it is practical to ask her to use Dropbox or similar and manually move files from one app to another or to mark individual photos to make available offline, etc.

Ideas?

[Note: Another way to rephrase this question is “How do I use an Android tablet as a remotely managed digital picture frame?” I recently purchased a Pix-Star digital picture frame and it offers this capability. It is a pretty nice interface if what you want to do is remotely manage the photos that a busy or naive user will be able to view. An Android app that had similar capabilities to the picture frame would be ideal, but given all of the fancy features of Picasa and Google+ I wouldn’t expect to need to install anything additional on the tablet.]

Thanks in advance for any help.

4 thoughts on “How to share photos with someone else’s Android tablet?”

  1. ‘Dropsync’ would likely do the job, it makes use of the Dropbox API to sync one or several folders. The folder contents are available offline (obviously) and there is a notification in the Android notification pulldown thingy after changes have been detected and synced. Sync can be set to time intervals as well as via change detection. I don’t know how well remote change detection works since I’m using the free version which doesn’t include the ‘advanced remote change detection algorithm’. Additionally there is a 5mb file size limit in the free version. I’m using it for a folder containing small text files and it works flawless for me.

  2. In Picasa, right-click on the album, select upload to “Google+ Photos…”, in the dialog box add her in the “add circles or people to share with” field. The album will show up in her Android Gallery.

  3. Brian: I tried what you suggest. It did not work. Nor does it work on my Android tablet. I don’t see photo galleries that have been shared with me in my Gallery. The only galleries that I see are those that I created myself.

  4. I’ve done this with several galleries, sharing them with my kids who are using Nexus 7s. I haven’t tested more broadly than that. The only thing I can think of is to check on Google+ to see if the sharing settings for that album are correct.

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