I’m looking for recommendations for an easy, no-frills method of transferring hundreds of jpeg of pictures from one place to another. Here’s the situation: my son is doing a study abroad program in Europe this summer. Not surprisingly, he’s having fun and taking a lot of pictures. He’s a complete beginner with a camera and does no post processing whatsoever. He’d like to send the pictures to me to do that and then return to him the “keepers” but email would be a ridiculously slow and cumbersome process.
Can you recommend a low-cost (preferably free) file sharing site that would allow him to upload with an easy drag and drop style and then for me to download in a similar fashion? Not necessarily looking for a display site, unless that has the other functionality we’re looking for. Drop box or something similar?
free: depends on the number you want to store. but dropbox works a charm. I use it to transfer stuff between my work machine and my home machines as well as my ipad etc.
you can use the supplied utility which has a synced folder on the host machine/'s (if you log into dropbox with the same account then you can have the same folder on each machine.)
dropbox is 2gb . but if you get a couple of friends ro register it gives you a bit more storage (upto 5gb free i think)
I also use skydrive (along with a few other storage sites).
skydrive was great as it used to give 25gb for free. but its cut down to 7gb now .but even 'just' 7gb is plenty .
with skydrive you can also use the synced folder but i found it easier to just upload thru the web UI . you can upload folders with the web UI (or atleast you couldnt when i last used it) but you can create folders in the UI and drag all the files into that folder.
with all these cloud services speed is never going to be great but if your son can have a connection thats reliable then it should be fine.
also you could use a service like smugmug. its more for viewing but will allow downloads of files as well.
there is a cost involved in sugmug.
But if you dont want to use a public cloud service and dont mind an outlay for the drive then you could look at the Western Digital MYBOOK LIVE drives. these sit on your home network and allow you to access from anywhere via the internet.
ive not used one but I hear good things about them . the duo version allows some form of backup as well (2 drives) . if your son has an idevice (ipad etc) then you can get an app for the mybook that allows you to connect and send stuff pretty easy.
Super. Thanks for the recommendations. Someone else suggested Minus, which sounds a lot like Dropbox and Skydrive. I'm giving it a try. 10 gb free and the uploading and downloading seem to work pretty well, at least for my simple test of five files between my work and home computers.
