Memories on the Cloud

The Cloud companies are competing for end users for allowing them to use their services to store their memories(mostly photos/videos) in the Cloud (Ahem! remote harddisks that scale). Its the era of the cloud and sharing.

Pictures are the fastest way to capture a moment. A picture is worth a 1KB of words (but sized about a few MB). Sharing and saving photos, videos are getting famous and easy with cloud storage from each of Adobe, Amazon, Google, Dropbox along with Flickr (now providing free 1TB of storage). Google Glass makes it very easy to snap photos. (Article on Wired). (Don’t forget to read through the most boring parts of Disclaimer and T&C before using services).

Adobe Revel::

Pricing: Free | $5.99/Month – Unlimited Photo Upload during 1st month

Works On: Mac, iDevices, Web

Uses: Amazon EC2 servers

Amazon CloudDrive::

Pricing: Free (5GB) | $10/year (20 GB) | $25/year (50GB) | $50/year (100 GB)  | $100/year (200 GB) | more …

Works on: Android, Mac, Web

Flickr::

Free 1TB of space (1000/1024 GB) (with Ads when browsing)- Announced on 21 May 2013

Pricing: Free | $49/year | $499/year

Works on: Web

Dropbox::

Free 3GB or 5GB space for photos/videos – Announced early 2012

Pricing: Free 2GB + 250MB/invite | $9.99/month (100 Gigs) | $19.99/month (200 Gigs) | $49.99 ( 500 Gigs )

Works on: Web, Android, iDevices, Desktop

PicasaWeb / Google+ Photos::

Pricing: Free with 5GB / 15 GB (15 GB now with Google Drive) | $4.99/month (100Gigs) | $9.99/month (200 Gigs)

Works on: Web

Box ::

(Nothing special for multimedia content as per advertisement)

Pricing: 5GB Free | $9.99/month (25 GB) | $19.99/month (50GB)

Works on: Web | Windows

Mac OS X: Automator Script to share publicly in Dropbox

Reason for this – Cloud App has a new feature and the present free accounts that are present  can use it for only for 3 months. 

Adapted from the course book for Principles of Programming Language – Concepts, Techniques, And Models Of Computer Programming from Flipkart.com ( Amazon link ) by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi . 

Food for thought: Which kind of data should I be storing in services like CloudApp and which in Dropbox like services ? I decided to go with Dropbox, Tumblr and GitHub. Since data from dropbox stays and there is an easy way to backup from tumblr and GitHub is the new sf.net . I think I should re-factor the above into another blog post 🙂 

There are quite a few services for Mac OS X listed in the dropbox wiki . I thought if I could write my own that would store a file or a directory into the Public folder of Dropbox  and yup, it was simple enough. The shell script used is hosted at Git Hub – https://gist.github.com/747501 (requires configuration). Automator script is here – http://bit.ly/b44McN (my Dropbox Public Folder). 

Bitly ( A famous url shortener with analytics tracking )  API –http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation