HSLD

Here are few photography resources that make sharing images across the web a breeze, albeit in two different ways.

First up is Dropbox, which is a cloud-connected file sharing program. Once you install the free software, you just drag files into the dropbox folder on your desktop and they are automatically loaded to your secure online account.

Many people use dropbox as a personal offsite backup solution, however it work equally as well as a file sharing platform. As mentioned, your files are secure and private, although you can share individual photos, or folders containing any file format. For mobile users, dropbox is extremely useful tool that allows access of your files on the go. In addition, there are apps for most popular mobile platforms.

The basic free account is 2GB, and there are 50GB and 100GB paid accounts.

Signup via this link and get free extra storage above the 2GB
http://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTY3NjI1NTA5

Next is Slideshow Pro Director

Director is an online photo hosting platform, similar to Flickr but without the social media aspect. It offers unlimited bandwidth and storage, and even the ability to run the LAMP software on your own server if you chose.

The cool thing about Slideshow Pro is the ease and flexibility of building Flash based slideshows. The slideshows are configurable, and if your an Adobe Lightroom user, the SSP plugin gives you absolute flexibility over the output. I use the Lightroom plugin and the hosted Director account and the workflow works like this:

I import and process photos in Lightroom, next I export (upload to the web) the keepers to the hosted SSP Director account via the free Lightroom export plugin.

Next login to my Director account and configure my slideshow with just a few clicks.

Finally, the software generates either link to the slideshow, or embed code if I want to place the slideshow on another website.

Slideshow Pro is obviously not for everyone, but if your taking a lot of photos and wondering how to share them with a wide audience while maintaining complete control over the style, it's worth a look.

Learn more here:

SlideShowPro: The complete photo and video slideshow publishing solution

Lightroom Plugin:
SlideShowPro / Products / SlideShowPro Player

Cubdriver

I think of cloud computing as moving some of the computing I do to another computer, always a much bigger one that is shared with many users, rather than mine. For example, if I open up the MS Excel software and cook up a nice worksheet using that software, something I do all the time, I do not even need to be connected to the internet because nothing happens off my computer. In cloud computing, all of that including the software would happen at an off-site computer instead although it would look much the same as it did if it resided within my own computer. The Excel software, the worksheet I make, the actual computation or cpu work, all that moves into the "cloud". I never know or need to know where the real hardware and software is with this system, but it also is out of my control and inaccessible if I do not have an internet connection. I have to trust the company hosting the cloud to keep it all safe and to have it when I need it.

However, Dropbox sounds to me not as much like cloud computing as it does like an ftp site. An ftp site has you to install a little bit of software on your home pc in order to use it, and that software is not much more than a doorway system for the ftp site to use while moving stuff to and from your computer through the internet connection. It does not use the internet in the normal "http" sense, it uses "ftp" protocol instead and it really acts about the same. It could be a superficial resemblance between Dropbox and the normal old ftp site we all know and love, but I suspect it is really just an ftp site that does not use ftp for the connection protocol and uses a high-security http protocol instead. I am not sure, but maybe some of you computer geeks will know.