Share pictures from multiple phones to a shared space

I recently was trying to determine the best way to have a variety of people send pictures to a shared space. I was looking to figure this out for an art lesson where a teacher wanted students in her various classes to take pictures of art in their neighborhoods, answer some reflective questions about each piece and share it all with others. Her idea was to have the students each email her the pictures to her email account then she would take each picture and place it in a power point with the picture name and question answers.

My thought was that this would be too hard and too time consuming so I turned to my personal learning network for advice where I asked:
"How can you take pics on ur phone, then send from phone to a shared space or album?"

Here are their suggestions:

From Twitter:

cwebbtech I have shot pics on my phone and then sent them to my drop.io account. Works very well.
matthewbritton E-mail is the easiest if it has to be universal - but not that many people have e-mail set up on their phones.
jdthomas7 Many ways, here is good article if you use Flickr: http://ow.ly/1CQmC
zenirj app shozu does it pretty well. What r u trying to send to. Most places will set up email for that.
techeducator Evernote! It creates an email address that you can send things to. Then you can make it public. Works with webclips photo etc.
Aaron_Eyler there is a setting in FlikR for an upload-like feature via email.
iSchoolBand I use an app called photobucket. It is free and makes sharing simple.
smilieface80 Have u tried Clixtr? Goes to shared album. Think u can even check it on the web afterwards. Still have yet to try it tho.

From Facebook

Melanie Sutherland Holtsman - I have a flickr app I do that with

Kristin Hokanson - flickr gives you and email that you can use that's how I do it :)

Jeff Branzburg - Can be done with Google's picasaweb; each account has an email address to send pix to. Not sure about mms access though. Maybe there is a paper book explaining it ... oops ... I mean online electronic text!

Laura Sabbagh - maybe from your phone you can email it to yourself and do it from there?

Lisa Velmer Nielsen - Jeff and Kristin, when you email it to flickr or picassa how does it go into a special album? And, Jeff (haha) so old school :-p No one's gonna go out and buy info we can get for free right here :-)

Kristin Hokanson - In flickr prefs, you can set your settings up so that you can tag all pix that are emailed. Usually I set up the set afterward from the tags OR like we did at PETE & C...embed a slideshow that filters any picture with that tag into it. Helpful?

Jeff Branzburg - If I send a pic via email to picasaweb it goes to a public folder named dropbox with a URL.

Here's what I decided to do and how.

I picked two of the suggestions to try. The one that was recommended the most and the one that was fresh on my mind. Here is what I found.

Drop.io
I like Drop.io a lot. In fact I just wrote this about it Drop off audio, video, or text files that can be discussed and commented on with Drop.io so I tried that first. Drop.io is very easy to use for this purpose as you instantly get an email where pictures can be sent. The pictures appear on a page with the email subject line and message body listed as a comment. The pictures can easily be downloaded or embedded. What didn't seem easy to do was group the pictures or make them into a slide show.

Flickr
I decided that Flickr does the trick pretty well. Here's how and why. With Flickr you set up a professional account. Flickr gives you an email address to which students send pictures. You can tell Flickr what tag should be associated with pictures sent to that email and you can change the tag at anytime. So, if you were doing an art project the tag could be the subject and your class grade and room number i.e. art8-403. Therefore without any work all the students photos would be tagged with that code. You would then have the student indicate the name of the art in the "Subject line" and the answer to the questions in the "Message" or "Body" of the email. This appears as the photo title (subject) and description (message/body). The teacher can click on a tag (which she already set up in advance) and run a slideshow without any work on her part. As the slideshow runs it shows the name of the art along with the answers to the questions in the description. If the teacher would like she can also encourage students to comment on one another's photos in the comment box.

This option saves the teacher several hours over the method of having students send individual emails and then requiring the teacher to download every picture then create a powerpoint, upload each picture, and copy/paste the titles and question answer. This really requires no work on the part of the teacher once her account is set up. Students just email the picture to her Flickr email with a subject and answer to the question and wah-la. It's showtime! What's more you get a url so the slideshow can be embedded into any online space and shared with the world.