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.
On that note, Dropbox streamlines exactly the process you describe (I'm whoring it out now as it's pretty darn good... now that I finally got an invite. I have a few of my own, too, if you're curious.)
thought of that but there's a 20 MB limit and i'd go nuts dumping photos (zipped) 0.02 GB at a time - if i was smart i'd be able to write a script that did it to an entire folder of photos, zipped them into 10MB chunks and emailed them to a gmail account specifically opened for the purpose. hmmm.
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.