So many phones and digicams these days, shoot in multi-megapixels and record in full HD. MicroSD cards are great for storing photos and videos locally. But how do you share these jumbo images and movies with friends? Most popular Web-based email services place a limit like 25 MB on the size of the attachment, whereas an average 2 minute movie of best YouTube quality can take 100 MB or more.
Till recently, we used to make use of third party services like HighTail (formerly YouSendIt), WeTransfer, Box etc -- but this has its hassles: You open an account with the file transfer service. You upload your file, then send the link to your friends. They open the links and download the file -- and they have to do it fast because most such links are available for just 2-7 days.
Thankfully at least 3 of the most popular email services -- Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Outlook Live/Hotmail -- have heard user's woes and responded: by offering their own cloud storage options to serve as a hub through which large files can be routed along with emails.
Gmail users can activate their own cloud store, Google Drive which effectively gives them an addition 15 GB of storage. They can now send large files with their Gmail -- limited in size only by the total Google Drive storage they have remaining. There is a 50MB file size limit on presentations and documents uploaded to Drive and converted to Docs and Slides, and a 100MB limit on spreadsheets converted to Sheets.
Similarly, Microsoft's email users can seamlessly access free 15 GB of space on OneDrive and use it to send large files through their Outlook or Hotmail accounts. One Drive has a limit of 10 GB per file uploaded. By right-clicking the item or items you want to share, you’ll see a ‘Share a OneDrive link’ option that you can paste it directly into an email, IM, or other message.
Not having its own cloud store, Yahoo has tied up with Dropbox so that its mail users can exchange large files in similar fashion. I have just used all three email services to send and received a 150 MB Quicktime movie file with no problems. I used a Gmail account to send and could read the file in Yahoo or Hotmail and vice versa.
Now from mobile messengers too
Instant messaging apps for mobiles have always allowed their closed groups to share pictures or movie clips. They have generally been limited to 15-- 25 MB -- and to media type files only.
Last month Hike India's own home grown Instant Messenger, became the first to offer a Big File Transfer feature, allowing users to send or receive a file of up to 100 MB in any format-- ppt, doc, zip, avi, mp3, pdf.... This could be a plus point especially for students who can exchange notes or presentations from their cell phones, without needing to find a PC.
The push from Hike, may come to a wider shove -- making the transfer of elephantine files a cinch -- with a mouse click or a mobile.
