One question I’m constantly facing is, “Now that I have all these photos scanned, what in the world do I do with them?” I have relatives who say they would love to see them. But it takes far more work to get the photos to them!
Now that they are computer files, I can email them out, a few at a time. I can post them on my web site or on Facebook. These days you can create coffee table books, calendars, etc. All of those things take time, and therefore, chances are they won’t actually happen. At least, in my case, not soon!
I have found the @Dropbox service is a great (and free!) mechanism for file sharing amongst friends and relatives. Let me take a moment and explain Dropbox from this standpoint, because we’re going to be doing the same thing with Windows Live Mesh. Dropbox, according to Wikipedia, has over 50 million users. It’s a mature, reliable, and securely encrypted service.
The original idea with Dropbox is that you use it for yourself. You install Dropbox on each of your computers (including your phone), and everything in your Dropbox folders is always available to you, on every computer. You can also use a web browser and obtain your files through their web site. It’s quite handy!
The free version of Dropbox has limits, somewhere between 4 GB and 21 GB of file space. That is an awful lot of space for day-to-day usage. On the other hand, when you begin making thousands of high-resolution scans of photos and old hand-written documents, you run out of Dropbox space in a hurry!