[katabasis]

Private shared photo albums in Apple Photos are great for this. I have a small child and my wife and I live far from our extended families. Sharing photos and videos of our daughter via a shared album gives the same immediacy as posting to social media does (you even have likes, comments, etc) but it's way more private.

As long as everyone has an Apple device it just works, and I assume there is probably a similar way to do this with a Google photo album (although I will say, I think Google is way more likely to do something sketchy like default everything to public or make it easy for someone to publish content accidentally).