PShizzy: The Blog

One of the most common sources of frustration I have on a regular basis is that of filesharing. That’s because while everyone has the internet, how we have it and how we use it is so unique to each of us, that we often end up with a few incompatibilities.

Let’s take email. Everyone’s got an email address. But not everyone supports the same file size for attachments and downloads. I can send 20MB files (thank you GMail), but you might only support 5-10MB (like my Cox account supports). Now what?

How bout IM’s? Excellent. I use AIM. You use MSN? How are we even friends? Ok I use Adium. What? Ya, it lets me use AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. Great. Wait, does it let me share files across? Yes. But crap, I’m on a router, so now I have a firewall. What, you’re on a router too? But it says the file is sending. Of course, it’s said that for the last 10 minutes. And ya, I’m just trying to send you a small jpg, so this should have been done nine minutes ago.

Ok how bout FTP? Great. I have one. Do you have a server? What’s your ftp address. What, that’s private. Ok. I’ll post the file on my webspace. Wait, now it’s too public.

Using a common protocol is tough for sharing because we may not have any in common. Making a file public is bad because now the file is public. It’s funny because the answers we seek end up being their own problems. So what if I had a place where I could store files, make them public or private on a file or folder level, share them via email, a special link, or otherwise, and generally have the ease of use of a download for our users, while we have the security of using a service with its own protocol on our backend.

Oh ya, what if it were free too, unless you want to move single files that are over 100MB (which at the rate cameras keep upgrading the sensors and megapixels might be next year)? Keep on reading!

And so I present to you, Mediafire. You don’t need an account to share files, but if you try to access your files from another computer, it’s not possible. Accounts, as I mentioned, are free. You are limited to 100MB per file, but unlimited space total.

Uploading files is easy. Just hit the big green “Upload Files to Mediafire” button. Then select all the files you wish to upload. You can only select files within a folder (not the folder itself), but if you have files within multiple folders, you can select any in one folder, hit OK, then hit upload more files to select another folder and any files in there. You can opt to save to your main area, to any of your folders, or even create a new folder to upload into.

Once you start the process, it will upload a few files simultaneously, and once each file is done, will proceed to verify the file (not sure what that process does, but I’m guessing a virus and encryption scan). On average, I have 1 or 2 files fail per 100 with some obscure error ID. The interface offers a Retry button for that file (while every other file is still uploading, so no time is really lost), and I’ve never had a file fail on a retry. Once everything is done, you can review the files, share them, etc.

Files are easy to share, and you can hit the share button to copy a link to the files for sending to others, or even email them the link from Mediafire. Mediafire even supports download plugins like Getright or DownThemAll, so you can resume a broken download. Nice.

Files and/or folders can be made private, public, or shared. Not only that, but you can share your Mediafire area, and can even get a custom URL for it. Here’s mine:

http://www.mediafire.com/pshizzy

When I access this area myself, I can view all my files, including private ones, as per the left. The viewing public can only access my public files, as per the right. So when you click, you’ll only see two Quicktime movies and a “softball” folder. I can also set a password on my files (the exception being images, which is weird), so that only certain people can download them. (btw, I used Firefox for the left, and Safari for the right, so I could simulate not having an account).

While you can’t see the private folder above, I can still opt to share a file in there. Here’s a link to a file inside my private folder.

That softball folder is a folder I used to show off Dropbox’s image gallery feature. If you don’t know about Dropbox yet, they’ve finally come out of beta, and the service is still awesome. Feel free to check out my review of Dropbox here. Mediafire also offers an image gallery feature, different from Dropbox, but equally as convenient in creating a gallery for you to display your images without any work on your side other than uploading the files. Where Dropbox goes for simple, Mediafire goes for thorough. Different size thumbnails, downloading, embedding of images, etc.

So, all these great options. There’s gotta be something wrong, right? Well, you can’t upload files that have a password of their own (so no password protected zip files, as an example). The 100MB limit isn’t a big deal, until you want to upload a large Photoshop file, or a big zip file or something. You can’t create any direct link files, so anyone who clicks on your link has to go through Mediafire and their ads (which pay the bills). You can even see an ad in the image above.

And the big one: While Mediafire offers some privacy features, anything that’s public is still really public. As in you can download the files, share it with others, etc. Not only that, but you can search Mediafire for any public files. Which means someone can search your public files. This isn’t a big deal if you just want to share pictures of the family or something. Without properly tagging your images, there’s no easy way to root out your specific files. Sure, we can look for jpg files in general, or mov or avi, but I’m pretty sure a website called Mediafire has a bunch of those. Just a hunch. Finding your specific files probably means that a person would have to guess the filename, or tags you added. So just don’t add tags (and why would you, unless you wanted to be found). But I do mention this because for some of us, especially the paranoid type (like me, who has duplicates of every file, plus online access with their own backups).

Pro accounts (starting at 6.97 a month) can eliminate some of these issues, but then it’s not free anymore, and what’s the fun in that?

So, there it is. The service isn’t perfect, but it is free, convenient, and safe enough (given that it’s free). I personally use it to store large movies that I have put on my blog, and for any file that’s a little to big to email to people. I wouldn’t use it for clients or anything, but see no problem with using it for files that I already wanted to be public or didn’t care if it went public.

Whether or not this service is something you can use is a personal decision. I hope that my article has at least given you enough information to figure that out.

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