Q: How to send a bunch of photos to friends?

You can post them to a photo's hosting site such as Flicker or you can simply e-mail them to all of your friends.

You don't indicated what app you use to manage your pictures, however if you use Apple's Photo's app it has the ability to email photos directly from the app. You can learn how to do that in iCloud Photo Sharing - Apple Support

when I had to mail a big video the mail program wanted to use a shared part of iCloud drive which would keep the data there for a amount of time and the mail would include an url so the recipient could get the data downloaded from the iCloud drive that way

Hola, o utilizo la página de wetransfer, puedes transferir archivos de hasta 2 gb y poner a varios destinatarios. Ellos recibirán un enlace de descarga.

I use DropBox for that considering that only about 20 percent of my contacts are on Macs. I drag a folder of image to the Dropbox folder on my computer and they are uploaded to the DropBox server. Then through DropBox I send my friend an e-mail that files are available; Dropbox includes a link and you can specify the permissions so, if needed, only the person received the message has access. If you need to mail to a group, you can set permissions so everyone has access.

So my friend gets an e-mail with the link and can then either view images through Dropbox or download the images at his leisure. In our part of the US Inland Northwest, many people still have slow internet . We have 100MBps but I have friends still on dialup . If I email my dialup holdouts a folder of images, two things are pretty much assured:

1) The photos will take hours to download, tying up his computer na phone service, or

2) His e-mail service limits attachment sizes and the files never arrive.

Your mileage may vary but I find the Dropbox method easier at both ends from the conventional image hosting sites.

You could try using "Mail Drop":  Mail Drop limits - Apple Support

Agree that Dropbox is the way to go, easy peasy.  I highly recommend.