If you’ve been to a family gathering or birthday party, you’ll notice how everybody seems to bring their own camera. You will also know how difficult it is to collect everybody’s shots into one collection. Sending and asking images to and from all attendees is often a daunting task. Browsing all of their Facebook accounts and downloading all the images one by one is not much easier either. A better solution is to set up a “dumping place” where everybody can put their images (and videos) so that the files are available to all family members.

The scenario is only one of the many possible usages of RRRipple – an online tool that will let you:

“Organize, display and share photos, videos, comments, notes, links and files in your own online portfolio.”

Other usage possibilities suggested by RRRipple are a place for teachers to post data for students and parents, and a container for files in one project collaboration.

Getting Started

Aside from the standard signing up process, RRRipple allows you to sign up using your Facebook account. If you use Facebook to set up your RRRipple account, you will be asked to provide a preferred email address.

The first thing you need to do after you are finished setting up your account is invite your friends and/or family members to join the service. After all, what good is a group sharing feature without any group members?

Then type the email addresses of the people you want to invite, write a short message, and click the “Invite” button.

After the message is sent, a confirmation window will appear.

I honestly expected more from the “invite new contacts” step. If users are allowed to sign in using their Facebook account, why can’t they invite people from their Facebook friends list? It would be more convenient than having to invite contacts one by one via email.

Before you go any further, you might want to watch the welcome video to familiarize yourself with the service.

Building The Library

The next step of the process is building your RRRipple library by adding content to it. Click the “Import” button at the top right corner of the page.

RRRipple accepts virtually any kind of files, including photos and videos. You can import files from your computer’s hard drive to RRRipple’s cloud storage. If you have a large collection of photos in your Facebook account, you can import them directly to RRRipple.

You will see your Facebook photo albums, choose one and click “Open” to start importing photo(s) inside that album.

A progress bar will tell you how far along the importing process has gone.

After the importing process is finished, you can add more details to the files. Click “Post” to finalize the process.

The files will be added to your portfolio and sorted chronologically.

Let’s Get Together

Now it’s time to share. You can create new groups, choose members of the group from your contacts, and drag and drop the contents of your library to your group(s).

To add a new group to your “Group Portfolios“, click the “Create Group Portfolio” button and fill in the necessary data. There’s the option to allow group members to post and share content. Unless you want the group to be a passive one, enable this option.

You can create as many groups as you need, for example: Family, Office Friends, Hiking Buddies, Project X, Annie’s 2nd Birthday, etc. Then share related content to the group from your library.

Other than the Flash-based web application, RRRipple is also available as an iPhone and iPad app.

If you need a tool to help you share and get files among groups while having fun doing it, RRRipple might be able to answer the need. However, I found the web app to be a little slow and some of my upload attempts failed in the process. Hopefully, the glitch will be addressed by the developer in the future.

Have you tried RRRipple? Do you know of other similar services? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comment below.