Sharing Videos but not with the Whole World

Following on from the previous post, I've just discovered Vimeo, which is like Youtube ought to be. It is still free, but it allows you to password protect videos that you only want to share with family, say. And it saves your original video files so you can download them again (or other users can if you want). All very slick, and without a lot of the "crud" that seems to have grown on Youtube. It has a 500MB per week limit, and it allows you to do HD video too, and supports 16x9 videos (unlike Youtube...). All in all well worth a look. Sort've like a grown-up Youtube!

Sharing Photos but not with the Whole World

There are absolutely loads of photo hosting sites on the net - mainly free (Picasa, Flickr etc) or cheap (SmugMug etc). Or there's all the web hosting services as well (and lets not forget Amazon S3). And the actual photo sharing sites like Flickr give you nice galleries, printing options, and so on.

But if you want to share photos with, say, family, for free, using a nice gallery, but not share them with the rest of the World, your options are more limited. Most free sites that offer private galleries are effectively social networks, like Multiply, that require your photo recipients to have a userid and be logged in. And frankly, for most people that's just too much hassle to bother.

So I was well pleased recently to discover Photoshelter, which is kind've like Flickr but aimed more at "pros". It's mainly a pay site, but you can get a fully featured account for free, limited only by 50MB storage space. And its huge benefit in the current context is that you can password protect galleries, so that anyone can log in even if they're not a registered user, as long as you've sent them the URL and the password. This fits the bill exactly!

I know Picasa has "private" galleries, but they're not password protected, it's just the old discredited "security by obscurity" thing. I suspect SmugMug may do the feature properly, but then it's not free. So Photoshelter gets my vote.

There's a review of it here.

Sipgate Update

I've been using Sipgate for my VOIP telehone service for a few months now, and they are really very good. Good features, local phone number for free, no line rental, excellent call quality, have never had service unavailable, and still dirt cheap. Definitely a "recommend".

Voip Trouble

Oh dear, after about a year of good service, babble.net seems to have gone bust, taking nearly £2 of my credit with them...

So I've swapped voip provider to sipgate, who are only slightly more expensive (ie. still very cheap), and generally seem more professional, with better tech support etc. Also, I now get (for free on the PAYG deal) my own geographic UK phone number that accepts incoming calls, and works fine both ways with CLID etc. And free voice mail. Looks good so far, too early to report on audio quality, reliability etc.

Email Nirvana

I've now transferred all our email setups completely to gmail/google apps for your domain, and am using their IMAP services as well, rather than POP3. It is all totally brilliant (especially with Thunderbird) Now we can use multiple accounts easily via "traditional" email client software (but across multiple PCs) and webmail, and mobile mail from our phones/PDAs (using the Google Java mail apps) and the whole thing stays automagically synchronised. What's been received, read, sent, deleted, moved, filed, whatever. Brilliant. All mail stays on the server (6GB inbox limit and rising), so no worries with needing to back it up (although, I do still do it weekly, but that's another story, involving POP3 and Jungledisk...). Only thing is you've got to trust Google...

Still also using Bigfoot addresses for some incoming, but it gets routed to Gmail.

Oh, and the spam filtering is really, really good in my experience, too. So I no longer need to use popfile, very good though it was. And all communication with Google is encrypted both ways, which is a bit of a privacy/security bonus (again, you've gotta trust Google though). Obviously if you send unencrypted emails (who doesn't?) then they can still be read by ISPs (though obviously not my ISP!), three letter agencies, four letter agencies, all kinds of people en-route, but hey.