
Sharing Is (Still) Hard - ivankirigin
http://blog.kirigin.com/sharing-is-still-hard
======
apaprocki
I understand your specific pain ;) I suppose a quick "hack" would be to allow
creating "managed" accounts where you can easily have management access over a
sub-section of family/friend accounts without knowing their password, etc.
That doesn't solve the underlying problem, though.

Maybe there is room for a single-click-install desktop software app that
simply takes the name/email of the destination contact for the arbitrary
content and then crawls provider APIs to quickly determine how best to get the
content to that person and orchestrates it using the APIs so that the end-user
doesn't need to learn configuration screens and confusing (to them) UX.

------
bpeebles
What's wrong with uploading 200 photos to Flickr? Sharing 1.8GB of photos more
than once on Dropbox (who deletes things like this?) means you need a paid
Dropbox account. So even if this was in the Past when Flickr didn't have an
"unlimited" free account, you'd still need to pay for something.

The only way I've found Flickr isn't good at sharing a large number of photos
if you want/expect some people to have high res versions of all or a large
percentage of those photos on their computer so they could print them offline
or something.

Still an unsolved problem there, but if all you were going to do was "host
them on a hostname", I'm not how Flickr _doesn 't_ address the need very well.

~~~
ivankirigin
I think Flickr recently removed limits, making it the best option. I doubt he
has the desktop uploader though, so the upload experience is much worse than
Dropbox.

------
kyro
I bet he wouldn't have had any problems emailing that folder to you. I know
when I need to send a few documents or photos, I without even thinking try to
do it via email, only to be met with messages of exceeding size limits.

Is there a service that ties both the action of emailing with the process of
syncing via dropbox? If not, I could see it being incredibly useful for people
like your dad, and mine. An app whereby you go through all the same motions of
creating a new email, attaching a few documents/folders, and in the background
those attachments are being synced to some dropbox folder.

Of course, email services could expand their size limits, but I'm sure there's
a reason why they're not.

~~~
ivankirigin
Yep, it's too big to email.

Dropbox integrates with a few mail clients actually.

~~~
Gravityloss
Email is actually a great and natural way to share things.

It's often easier to mail documents and comments to a content
management/ticket system than actually go there, log in, press "create new"
etc.

If the email protocols could be extended for efficient file transfer and cloud
hosting somehow, a lot of people's lifes would suddenly get a lot easier.

~~~
__--__
What about a desktop app that activated whenever you drag a photo into an
email? Instead of attaching itself to the email, it uploads the photo to imgur
and externally links to the image in the email instead?

------
GBKS
I agree that Dropbox is not very good at sharing photos. The solution really
has to start much earlier in the tool chain, ideally with the camera itself,
or the tool that downloads them. Smart phones are great with this, since you
see share options right after snapping a photo. iPhoto also has fairly decent
sharing options (resizes images, creates web albums, etc). But once you're
outside of the realm of camera and photo apps and working with general purpose
tools like Dropbox, it gets a lot more difficult.

~~~
ivankirigin
I have an eye-fi that directly uploads to Flickr with settings set to private.
It's right in the SD card! [http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Fi-Class-Wireless-
Memory-EYE-FI-8P...](http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Fi-Class-Wireless-Memory-EYE-
FI-8PC/dp/B002UT42UI)

This is the equivalent of the mobile app experience with Dropbox. Curating and
sending photos around is still hard.

------
kumarski
I've worked with users that are anywhere from 15 to 85. You've hit on a lot of
key issues. Sometimes they ask questions like "What's a browser?" and then you
have to remind yourself that the average middle America user is so far from
the demands of a silicon valley user.

Disclaimer: We make a solution in this space.
[http://eversnapapp.com](http://eversnapapp.com)

I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. Well written piece.

------
informatimago
What is wrong with FTP? Or scp if you prefer?

scp -r pictures dad@my.son.computer.org:~/pictures

Oh right: this would go directly from your dad's computer to hour own
computer, encrypted, without passing by the NSA case and without your dad's
pictures scanned for terrorism.

------
cpach
I came to this conclusion as well when my Dad was looking for a way to share
travel photos.

Another issue: I imagine it would take a lot of time for the Dropbox client to
sync 1.6GB of data, even for people with fast Internet connections.

------
ivankirigin
true fact: I didn't share the images in this blog post correctly the first
time. I used the Dropbox links from the shared folder view, not the shared
link view. It's obvious what I put it that way, right?

