Tired of Cloud Drive

You know what?  Amazon Cloud Drive is a little bit of a pain.  I think it's time to start moving away from it. I think I'm going to give DropBox another look.

To be clear, I don't plan to stop using Cloud Drive altogether. For one thing, the Kindle integration is actually pretty nice.  And for another, they give Amazon Prime members a pretty decent amount of space for free.  And I find that the desktop Cloud Drive app actually works pretty well.  It's just the mobile app and the website that suck.

The mobile app

For starters, let me voice my new complaint with the mobile app: the semantics of syncing your pictures are rather poorly defined.  Or, rather, they're not defined — at least, not to my knowledge.  By that I mean: what happens when you delete a bunch of files from your Cloud Drive, but not from your phone's main picture storage?  I'll tell you what: the app tries to re-add them to your Cloud Drive. 

This has happened to me two or three times in the last week or two.  A couple of weeks ago I went through my Cloud Drive and deleted some of the pictures that were duplicated, out of focus, etc.  Now, at semi-random intervals, the app wants to re-upload them.

In fairness, this could be due in part to the fact that Amazon's apps all seem to share authentication and it seems to be semi-broken on my phone.  I've had this problem several times recently.  The Kindle app on my Galaxy Nexus will stop synchronizing and the settings will report that it is "Registered to .".  No, that's not a typo, my name is just missing.  And when this happens, I can't authenticate with the Cloud Drive app or the Cloud Player app either — they just reject my credentials.  So far, the only fix I've found is to deregister my device in the Kindle app settings and then re-register it.  That fixes the Kindle app as well as authentication in the other apps. 

The website

I've blogged about the Cloud Drive website and it's useless "share" feature before.  Well, despite that, the other day I decided to give that "share" feature a try.  Hey, maybe it won't really be so bad, right?

Good Lord, it was even worse than I'd imagined.

So my task was to share one or two dozen pictures of my son with my relatives.  Seems simple enough, right?  The pictures are already in my Cloud Drive, so I just need to send out some links to them.  As I noted in the last entry, Cloud Drive doesn't actually support sharing folders or sharing multiple files at once, so the only way to do this is by sharing one file at a time and copying the URL into an e-mail. 

As bad as this is, it turns out it's made even worse by the fact that Cloud Drive is now reloading the file list after you complete the "share" operation.  And to add insult to injury, the reload is really slow.  Granted, I have about 1500 images in that directory, but that shouldn't matter because the reload really doesn't need to happen at all.  I mean, nothing has changed in the folder view.  All that happens is that the UI locks up for a few seconds and then I get a "file has been shared" message.

So this only confirms my opinion that the "share" feature in Cloud Drive is unusable.  I mean, if sharing were just a matter of popping up the "share" dialog that holds the URL, copying it, pasting to another window, and then closing the dialog, that would be one thing.  It would suck, but I could deal with it.  But the brain-dead UI locking up for five seconds after each share just makes it too painful to even try.  I got through maybe half a dozen pictures before giving up in disgust.

Solution - DropBox?

So, clearly, I need another platform for sharing my pictures.  So I looked around and found myself mighily confused.  My requirements were pretty simple.  I wanted something that:

  1. Had a free account tier,
  2. Had an easy way to share by just sending someone a link,
  3. And provided a simple uploading option.

I briefly considered using the Google+ "Photos" feature, but gave up on that when I realized the whole visibility/sharing thing wasn't completely obvious.

For now, I'm trying out DropBox.  I've had a free DropBox account for a couple of years, but never really used it for anything, so that was one less thing to sign up for.  The desktop app is pretty nice and allows me just drag files between Explorer windows and shows an icon of the file's sync status.  And sharing things via the web UI is dead simple, which is exactly what I was looking for.  So we'll see how that goes.  Worst-case scenario, I won't have lost anything.

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