Sometimes I think that the difficulty of sharing large amounts of data non-locally is an intentional move by the designers of the systems that people generally use (Windows, routers, etc.). If its easy for the layman to share large amounts of data, then perhaps they might use it to share music and software and whatnot.

Taking off my tinfoil hat now.

For my own wedding pictures, also around 1GB, I set up a custom album on my shared hosting webserver. At the bottom is a link to wget and the precise wget command needed to fetch the whole album. I refused to provide any more support beyond that. You can lead a horse to water …

In your situation you could zip up all the images and throw the zip on the same server this blog is hosted on. I know you’re on DreamHost, so you must have “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth by now — meaning your bottleneck is CPU time, but hosting a single large file costs practically nothing to the CPU — so it won’t tax your shared hosting account.

As mentioned before, you could host the image archive on your own computer, but then you have to keep your computer running and it will be slow download for everyone. This is a last resort thing.

An extra tip for you, and I’ve mentioned this tool before, run jpegoptim on all the images. For the amount of images you have, it may losslessly trim off as much as 50MB making it that much easier to share.

Actually, you don’t really want to share the files with them. You just want them to have the pictures. For that purpose, I always use either Flickr or Picasa. Both systems have pros and cons, but both allow you to have a certain level of privacy and can be used even by people with no account (for viewing) and low IT awareness level.

Dropbox could work, but I would recommend upgrading to the $10 per month account just for a month or two if you want to go that route. I think dropbox might get fussy about using that much bandwidth on a free account. You should also make a screencast of how to download them if you go with dropbox (never underestimate the technical incompetance of people).

That said burning them to DVD’s might work out well too. A lot of people like having a physical copy of something (especially the older generation who don’t really understand how this whole “digital distribution” thing works).

I have been using Dropbox for the longest time now and I didn’t think of that. I might give it a try.

@ Kim Johnsson:

I wanted to post the exact same bandwidth quote and you beat me to it. :P

I’m sure I remember reading about something that was like the BitTorrent equivalent of a self-unpacking archive; you send one file and it starts up a basic torrent client with a torrent for something preloaded and downloads the file you really wanted to send.

Or I may have dreamt it. Damned if I could find it with the brief bout of googling I did.

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes hurling down the highway” ;D

I’ve personally never had to share more than 100MB at most with people, so I’ve never had this problem. I’d probably use Dropbox if ever faced with it though. If I had enough space that is, currently syncing lots of stuff to Dropbox…

I’d be tempted to write some web thingy and run it on my server, but it’d obviously be limited by my bandwidth. Nothing wrong with the download speed, but upload… Stupid ADSL -_-

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a CD or DVD full of pictures sent through the US postal service. You could spend three days jacking around with torrents and stuff, or you could slip a CD in a media mail envelope and call it a freaking day.

I like the Dropbox ideas and the personal web server ideas as well. Another way might be to just go somewhat old fashioned with it and burn them to CDs and drop them in the mail. That requires an investment on your part though, but you could ask that you be reimbursed for postage and what not too. Guess it depends on how many distant relatives you have to send these out to.

Ah screw it. Just use Dropbox. :)

Why dont you make a HTML gallery (try Irfanview Thumbnails http://lizardbrain.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/irfanview_start_batch_d ialog.png)

Then just burn the HTML galleries to an ISO and then onto DVD’s as is needed and post them to the guests.

Generally, I burn large files to CD or DVD and hand/mail it to the non-techie. With a competent user, and moderately sized files, I’ll put it on a dropbox or (if too big for dropbox) a personal webserver, and email the IP address.

For your situation, I’d pick out 25 or so of the best pictures, and just share those – email, flickr, picasa, or zip & dropbox. Surely the entire gigabyte of pictures isn’t worth sending around.