More apropos to what you're doing is ourdoings.com's option (on by default) to let anybody move a photo between the "featured" and "more photos" sections for a given entry. Make an unlisted site just for your friends, tell them to click on the "Edit" tab and volunteer. Once you approve them, everybody can upload, etc., so it's a nice group site.
It's integrated with Clickpass (a YC startup), so registration is trivial. You can edit photos after uploading thanks to integration with Snipshot (another YC startup). If $25 is a lot of money, maybe you should make your site public rather than unlisted. That way you could collect tips with tipjoy (another YC startup). Public sites are also the only ones that can use Disqus integration, until such time as Disqus supports private comments. OurDoings is the only photo-sharing site with Disqus comments.
P.S. Streamfile is written in Erlang, which is kind of cool.
It might even be easier and faster to go low tech. A few DVD-Rs or Flash drives and stamps would do the trick.
"Keep your visitors in sync. A mere click in your Gallery allows visitors to subscribe to your online photos, creating an album in their own iPhoto libraries with your full-resolution photos. When you update your Gallery, the albums on their computers update as well."
I would sign up a gmail account and upload the photos to it. Then give access to all your friends so that they can download and archive what you all want. It won't be pretty but you will be able to send the account.
2) Sneakernet! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
My only other piece of advice: upload from somewhere with high upload bandwidth.
Even in this day and age, the off-line solutions are better. Get a DVD or flash drive and send it by mail or FedEx. Even on a moderately fast connection 5 GB is no joke to download.
Otherwise, I'd say find a $5/mo web server account. Everyone zips up their images, ftp's them to the server, and you download each persons image bundle as a simple link.
You'd probably have no more than 100GB of aggregate monthly transfers, lots of options in that range. Plus you'd get email accounts and maybe make your own private forum to stay in touch.
-- the total number of shots can be edited down to the 'keepers'
-- web-resolution is sufficient for 95% of the photos being traded
Have everyone edit out the losers, batch process down to 800px jpegs, upload to a flickr group, and then transmit the ones you need higher-res versions of individually via email or mediafire or similar.
This is how even professionals shooting 50-200GB/day do things-- nobody delivers a HD with every single outtake, but instead they just post a web gallery of the candidates and then deliver the high-res files of the just the final selects.
2. put pics in your shared folder (do not share or download ANY other files)
3. go to shared files screen, select all, right click and select 'copy ED2K links' iirc.
4. send links by email
5. tell all the others to not share or download ANY other files.
See? less than $5 a month splitted among 5 guys for your own personal photo sharing site, easier impossible.
I'd pay $25 for that service.
(granted, we don't let people buy additional space yet, but ping beta@getdropbox.com and we can hook you up :P)
You can also set permissions on the files so that people can download them directly.
1. install the desktop client
2. drop all the pictures there
3. invite everybody you know.
everybody will sync all the photos (no limit). And it is FREE.
[There is a file sharing society in Japan, by invitation only, whose members ship encrypted hard drives to each other. Not just for bandwidth reasons.]