Anyone getting annoyed get with the hassles of online video and photo sharing? Either it’s not private enough or the resolution isn’t good enough, or your friends and family just can’t see it without calling you for help. Facebook is a great way to share, as long as your file is the right size, and you remember to update it. I just found a great alternative in Cloudfire.
Your Media Sharing Woes
You spent hours in MovieMaker or iMovie creating that perfect year-in-review masterpiece of your family. You now want to share it with your family and friends. It’s 15 minutes long; too long to share on YouTube or most other places. You already cut out as much as possible without eliminating school plays and the awesome photo montage at the end.
You don’t want to burn DVDs because you wanted to share it with a large list of family and friends and don’t have a DVD duplicator. What are you to do? There’s absolutely no way Facebook will let you upload anything longer than 2 minutes.
Or here’s another scenario. You’ve been relatively good about keeping your photos organized on your computer. You do occasionally post some things to Facebook, but you’re not really up to date there. Maybe you’ve gotten one photo every few weeks posted to your friends and family.
There’s got to be an easier way to just automatically upload and share everything.
Options
So how do you currently share your media online? There are a few basic ways you can do it:
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
- Online galleries (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc.)
As we’ve detailed in previous posts, email has many problems. Some people resort to compressing their files, which can be easy. Good luck with anyone on the other end doing anything besides putting it in their trash.
FTP can work well, but most people will look at you funny if you tell them to get your media from your server via FTP. If they don’t have the correct software loaded on their end you’ll still have problems. Besides, there isn’t a way to view the files except by download.
Online galleries are a great option, but they too have limitations. They are not updated automatically, they have file size limitations, and they don’t always allow your friends and family to download the high-resolution files for free.
Ok, so I’m busy (or lazy)
I just don’t have time to upload all this stuff and organize it online. Or, in the case of large video files, I really don’t have viable options.
That’s where Cloudfire comes in. You install their software and it automatically (and securely) finds your media and uploads it to their server. It is then transcoded and immediately available for viewing via Amazon S3 servers.
You customize what media you want to share and the software grabs it, and makes it available to your friends and family. It also automatically updates your wall on Facebook that new media was added to your gallery. A thumbnail and link is posted on your wall.
No thinking necessary.
What about downloads?
Your family and friends can download the full resolution files for free. They don’t need an account with Cloudfire to access any of this information, but they do need your password.
That’s the biggest complaint I’ve had with many photo sharing services. Either they require an account before you can view anything. Or they make it super easy to view, but it’s also easy for some stranger to access your media.
Security?
I’m a bit of a stickler for privacy and security, so I was a little hesitant to allow some software to upload my media. Turns out I had no reason to worry. They store everything on Amazon’s S3 server and use private password protected 256-bit encryption.
Check out Cloudfire if you want a worry-free, simple, automatic way to share your photos and home movies on Facebook.
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