Views.fm Turns Your Dropbox Shared Folders Into Sleek Photo Galleries
Dropbox has a nice “Photos” folder which lets you quickly create photo galleries from photos stored on your computers hard drive and share with selected friends or with anyone, via the “Public” folder.
While sharing photos, galleries and other stuff through the “Public” and “Photos” folder works just as fine, sometimes you might need more ways to share files, photo galleries, personal wiki’s, static websites, source codes and what not.
One of the features lacking in Dropbox is the ability to comment on the files or items stored in the shared folder. Let’s say you want to create a simple portfolio page using your Dropbox account. You drop all the images, files and items in the “Photos” folder and Dropbox automatically merges all of them into a sleek photo gallery which can be viewed by anyone, as long as they have the link of your shared folder.
So far so good, but what if you want to add the ability to comment on individual files stored in a particular folder of your Dropbox account ?
Enter Views.fm – a new web app which uses the Dropbox API and allows you to share and receive photo galleries from anyone. The unique thing regarding Views.fm is that other users can comment upon the individual files and items, apart from downloading them – which is of course the core functionality of the service and Dropbox of course.
Signing up is free and takes only a minute. Once you have authorized Views.fm to access your Dropbox account, go ahead and create a new folder where you would be hosting images and would want to create the photo gallery /portfolio page.
Run the Dropbox client on your computer, or use the browser uploader to upload all files to that specific folder.
Once all the files are in place, all you have to do is copy the specific URL from your Views.fm account and share with whoever you want to.
That’s it, your Dropbox powered photo gallery is live on the web and anyone with a link to that photo gallery can start downloading the files on their computer, without having to sign up for Views.fm or Dropbox.
Views.fm arranges all the images, photos, documents, presentations, PDF’s and other common file formats to attractive thumbnails so your shared users wont have any problems finding a specific file from a whole bunch of files dumped into the Dropbox shared folder.
Apart from public photo sharing, Views.fm also supports private sharing with selected people. People with whom a specific views.fm folder is shared can comment upon the items, files, pictures or whatever is stored in the Views.fm folder – which in a sense turns your Dropbox private shared folder into an information system.
This is perfect for small organizations, companies and developers who need a central position to manage files and want the ability to comment on specific files, without having to use any project management application, wiki or an internal communication system like Google Groups.
