Dropbox

Dropbox is an incredibly useful application for iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows, and a 2GB account is free.

Go to dropbox.com on a laptop or get it from your App store, creating a free account is easy, your email as a username and a password, choose free 2GB.

dropbox
DropBox signup from a laptop

On your laptop it will create a dropbox folder, you can add more folder inside to organize MP3, photo, video, office, text and so on. As you move files to those folders they are slowly copied up to DropBox’s secure servers, making them available to sync on any device you enter your username and password.

This is especially useful on an Android phone, as you can copy songs and videos to your device to playback when you are offline. This is similar to using a USB cable and copying songs to playback, except you can do it from anywhere in the world. iPhone unfortunately still requires you to use iTunes to copy files, but you can access or stream (play) the files as long as you have an internet connection on your iPhone.

Another great feature is you can share a folder with other DropBox users. A very secure, convenient way of sharing a folder of files. To do this, right click or control click a folder, choose Dropbox, then Share This Folder.

dropbox share
Sharing this folder called "Bananas", just right click or control click it

This opens your browser with this window.

dropbox share
Enter the email of the user and an optional message

Now you can enter in the email of the recipient and an optional message.

They receive  an email like this,

dropbox email
Sample email from Dropbox

 

Also when they login to Dropbox on the web they will see an indicator like this:

indicatornotice

They can then accept the invite and they will receive the files in their Dropbox .

Remember, if you delete the files on your Dropbox, this does not delete their files, or vice versa. The files are independent copies now.

You can also share a “gallery” of images with anyone, even if they don’t have a Dropbox. Place a folder of images in your Photos folder, then Right click or control click, Dropbox, Copy Public Gallery Link,

dropbox public
Choose Copy Public Gallery Link

This will copy to your clipboard a link to a web based picture gallery of images in that folder. You can paste this into an email and send to anyone and as many people as you want.

They will see something like this

dropbox gallery
Dropbox Public Gallery

Yummy