Dropzone Review

September 26, 2009 in Apps by David John

Computing has changed dramatically over the last few years impacting on the very way we all work. We are the digital sharing generation, file sharing, photo & video sharing, blogging, twittering offer us the opportunity to share our thoughts, ideas and our own creative masterpieces.

If you are anything like me you are spending a fair amount time uploading photos to flickr, documents to ftp spaces and even more regularly emailing documents and files to colleagues. The sharing process takes time but the good news is it is about to get considerably quicker with the release of Dropzone.

Dropzone is a really easy to set up and use drag and drop application. It can launch applications, move files to different folders, upload to FTP servers, Zip and Email and upload to Flickr, to name just a few features.

Dropzones comes with a stack more features as default but the application is pretty much limitless. Dropzone has a powerful Ruby based API that allows you to script Dropzone to do whatever you need. The code for all the Dropzone destinations is open source so you customise, and write your own destinations to make Dropzone even better.

Dropzone really does speed up the way you work and removes the requirement for having 2-3 applications open at the same time. This demonstrate on how to upload images to flickr  will show just how easy the application is to use.

There really isn’t any installation process for Dropzone, download and drag it to your ‘Applications folder’ and double click to run. Dropzone uses ‘Access for Assistive devices’ feature, this is turned on in the System Preferences section (Fear not, Dropzone takes you through this process easily).
Once you are up and running Dropzone welcomes you with a range of options (or destinations). All the destinations are easy to set up, click flickr to set up the easy photo upload option. Like any other third party application Dropzone must be ‘authorized’ before flickr will allow it to send photos to your photostream. To authorize, (or as we say in the UK authorise) click the ‘Authorize’ button (see below).

You will now be taken to the flickr account and within two clicks you can authorize the Dropzone application to have access to your account, this authorization can be easily revoked at a later stage if necessary.

Once set up using Dropzone is simple. Click on the image(s) you want to upload and drag it on to the Dropzone icon.

The following pop up will appear from the dock, (I have already setup flickr and also the ability to upload to a FTP server) simply drag your photo(s) on to the flickr upload icon.

A nice uploading message box appears that talks you through the quick upload and processing stages of transfer.

If you upload a single image the URL of the uploaded file is copied into the clipboard, open up your browser and paste it into the address bar to view the photo and make changes to the details, add tags etc.

If you drag a number of images in to the flickr uploader on completion it loads a list of the photos in flickr for the addition of Titles and tags.

Unlike the uploading photos via the browser uploader on the flickr site  you can’t apply tags to all the images at once.

This is a very small negative in comparison to how easy Dropzone is to use over the browser upload solution. If you are looking for a quick ‘throw a photo on to flickr’ solution then Dropzone is definite it !

For the amount of time Dropzone will save you at only $10 you won’t have to think to hard before purchase.

A full demo version is available from the Aptonic website. The demo is limited to fifteen days use and 5 dropzones.