Dropbox, the popular Cloud storage startup Apple wanted to acquire for a rumored $800 million, rolled out a new feature to enable easy file sharing across mobile and desktop platforms. While it’s been possible before to share folders, you can now give people direct links to the stuff in your Dropbox.
It’s integrated into the iOS client and across other platforms and basically lets you share files without having to re-upload them.
Dropbox noted in a blog post today today:
Sharing with friends and family is easy! Once you’ve saved that video of your niece’s birthday party to Dropbox, just make a link to send to grandma and she can simply watch online — no download required! This saves you the hassle of having to re-upload or attach it to an email.
Sharing is real easy: simply click the link icon next to the file or folder on the web, your computer or mobile device and you’ll get a unique link to send to anyone you want.
Clicking the link will take people to a snazzy web page that gives your shared documents, photos, videos and other content types a lavish treatment with nice gallery pages. They can see pictures, look at presentations and watch home videos without having to download and open them separately.
Best of all, the people you share you files or folders with don’t even have to run the Dropbox app or be a Dropbox user. Here’s what the gallery pages look like.
Unless a group of people need to edit a file, sharing via linking is much faster, Dropbox says, and it’s “the best way to make your content shine on the web”.
Are you using Dropbox less now that iCloud has arrived?
To me, it’s still the go-to service to keep my files safe and backed up and share stuff with others.