Photo Viewer: Automated to pull photos from several locations?

Okay folks, I'm posting this in here because I think it's kinda related. Here's a breakdown of what I want to do:

My ultimate goal is to provide a way for me, my siblings and possibly other family members the ability to deliver photos to my grandparents and parents to be displayed on a "photo viewer"--essentially a large LCD attached to a PC where the PC has folders that can pull new photo files automatically from the web (Dropbox, Picasa, Flickr or a similar cloud service where many members of the family can have access to upload photos). I would like to have the setup be as automated as possible and new photos to just "show up" on the photo display in my grandparents' dining room. It would be nice if I didn't have to pay a monthly fee to sites like Picasa, Dropbox, etc for large data storage because I imagine we will be uploading (together as an entire family) many, many gigabytes of data. So it would be nice to develop a way for the PC attached to the photo viewer to pull the photos, save/sync them to a local drive and then the cloud storage can be edited or cleared for new uploads without affecting what was saved locally--how to make sure the edits/deletions don't end up syncing over the local folder. It would be cool if we could also snap photos on our phone for upload so essentially a cloud service that has Android/iPhone app to allow for this--this would not be a deal breaker though.

Any tips or suggestions on how best to tackle this?
Edited by wildta - 9/24/12 at 11:20am

Thanks for the first post Dark Slayer to what I hope will become a great discussion on best practices of how to create something like this. It's funny you mentioned how you want to set up something like this for your grandmother for xmas because this was my intention as well. You also bring up really good points about family members dumping unfiltered photo collections and how they refuse to manage or clean out their collections--I can truly relate and sometimes I'm guilty of these bad habits.

My first thought was to use Dropbox:

• You can easily share folders with others
• You can also share mobile pics using the Dropbox App
• Setup would be super easy because the photoviewer slideshow would be enabled to cycle the shared dropbox folder on the host PC. I only have one problem, shared folders on dropbox are synced so any changes made from remote PCs will be synced over to the host.
• I especially like that you can sign up for an RSS feed of the shared folder and be notified whenever a change (in this case an uploaded photo) is made.

My other thought was to use one of my Skydrive accounts (I am lucky enough to have a couple accounts with 25gb of storage) which would be somewhat similar to the Google method you have outlined but with more storage. Skydrive also auto resizes photos and there used to be a way to email files to your skydrive but I don't know if they kept that feature in their new WIndows Tile refresh. This link discusses how to email pics to your Skydrive:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/email-photos-free-25gb-windows-live-skydrive/

I like your method much better and will try to test it out this week.
Edited by wildta - 9/26/12 at 12:01am