First off, you don't need to use the card that you received in your Mickey Mail. You can grab a new one at the parks, or heck, a new one from each photographer. Whatever card you do use, make sure to take note of the numbers. I recommend taking a picture of the back of the card or texting it to yourself.
If you think you might buy the PhotoCD, do pre-buy it. As long as it is less than 6 months out, you can request a refund if you are unhappy with the pictures. The savings from pre-ordering are more than worth it.
Anyone you share the password with for your account can login and view your pictures as long as you have registered the card. Take note however, that your countdown will begin ticking at that point. So if you are on vacation for 10 days, and Grandma views your pictures on Day 1, those pictures will expire in 30 days. You will lose 10 days of your editing time while you are at the parks.
Photopass will say that the pictures can take up to 24 hours to appear in your account. It will often be significantly faster, but shouldn't take longer.
I think though in this situation since the card is already associated to an account to be viewed online it'll be easier to use the Mickey Mail one just to keep track and you can always go to the view station to combine cards if you get extra (if you JTA or Pirates league make sure to go to the view stations to get your kids pictures from those cards). And also, we say the online time is 24 hours because it is standard to be about 24 hours, it's not instantly online, and there have been cases (with my own photos I got in the park as a guest) that it took a bit longer than 24 hours.
That is also why I had suggested to you PennyinPink that instead of giving others the login to your account that you just give them the photopass number and have them create their own account so anyone who looks at your pictures does not hinder how long you have to view them. You've got 30 days to 'claim' your photos on the website, once you've claimed them then you have 30 days to do edits, purchase, do the hula, whatever you want to do with those photos (legally of course)
These comments are correct, and good advice, but I feel as if they might be confusing to someone who doesn't understand PhotoPass entirely
I agree 100% that if you even possibly think you'll want the CD, pre-order it! It's already not worth what they charge for it at that rate...let alone the post-trip rate.
I guess the PhotoPass CM (Gt2B) would know more than I would about this, but I was always under the impression that a single Photopass card number could only be associated with one online account. Has that changed, or is that just a loophole? Regardless, I wouldn't personally recommend that method because who knows what could happen.
There is a way to generate a link and "Invite" someone to view your PhotoPass photos - which sends your friends and family to a simple site that just lets them SEE your pics as you "claim" them. However, we've discovered a major glitch in that they can only see the photos added to your account up to the moment you invite them. If you send the invite halfway through your trip, they won't see any new photos unless you invite them again, and again. Kind of dumb.
We take computers with us, so we attach our PhotoPass cards to our online accounts immediately. We will often each carry a card so that if one of us has easier access to our wallet/purse at that moment, we just use my or her card. We attach (claim) them both to our one PP account and all the pics show up. It's still a good idea to write down or take a picture of the back of your PP card(s) as soon as you get them so you never lose that number. Once it's lost, you're pretty much out of luck unless you already tied it to your account.
To clarify the 30 + 30 thing....from the moment a PP photographer snaps your pic and scans it to your card, that photo has a 30-day timer that starts ticking. After 30 days, if not claimed (attached to an online account) it evaporates. Then, from the moment you go online and type your card number into your account, you have your own 30-day ticker to make all your edits, add borders, delete bad pics, and place any print/CD orders before they expire.
I think it's silly to think that anyone would run out of time in 30 days to edit photos and place an order. Even if you back out a 7-10 day trip, that's an obscene amount of time to log in and add some fun borders and crop a few pics (or even a few hundred pics in our case, usually). If you can't do that in the 20 days after your trip, you're TOO busy, lol.
Thus, as I said, we always attach our cards to our PP account the moment we get them. Usually, we'll see that day's photos show up by the time we're checking the site before bed. Any pics taken that night will be there by the next afternoon when we come back for a break. And we'll always give our login/password to our good friend who will sit at home (housewife) and edit a bunch on her own. We'll still do many of our own, but she gets creative and does a lot of zooming and cropping that we wouldn't waste time doing. So, we end up with about 3-4 times as many photos as were originally taken. A plus if you have a creative friend or relative back home who can do that for you. Plus, they can see ALL your pics, and not just the ones they were invited to see.
Side Note: Only one photo (one that we REALLY wanted, because we knew it was good when it was taken) was lost forever, back in May. We even went to the Expo Hall to have them try to find it. They were able to scroll through every photo taken by that photographer during that time frame. We found all the pics before and after that one, but THAT ONE pic was gone. She said that it was either corrupted, or someone in the background could have been doing something obscene, so the PhotoPass screening team booted it.
