4 ms·

Sharing Is (Still) Hard

19 points by ivankirigin 13y ago

ivankirigin 13y ago
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?
cpach 13y ago
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.
bpeebles 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
GBKS 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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-8PC/dp/B002UT42UI http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Fi-Class-Wireless-Memory-EYE-FI-8P... This is the equivalent of the mobile app experience with Dropbox. Curating and sending photos around is still hard.
apaprocki 13y ago
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.
kyro 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Yep, it's too big to email. Dropbox integrates with a few mail clients actually.
  - Gravityloss 13y ago
    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.
    - __--__ 13y ago
      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?
informatimago 13y ago
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.
kumarski 13y ago
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.

19 points by ivankirigin 13y ago

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?

cpach 13y ago

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.

bpeebles 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

GBKS 13y ago

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 13y ago
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-8PC/dp/B002UT42UI http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Fi-Class-Wireless-Memory-EYE-FI-8P... This is the equivalent of the mobile app experience with Dropbox. Curating and sending photos around is still hard.

apaprocki 13y ago

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.

kyro 13y ago

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 13y ago
Yep, it's too big to email. Dropbox integrates with a few mail clients actually.
- Gravityloss 13y ago
  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.
  - __--__ 13y ago
    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?

informatimago 13y ago

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.

kumarski 13y ago

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.