It has become common to anxiously wait for a friend or relative to upload photographs to Facebook after a recent vacation or event. There are many photo websites that provide storage and sharing capabilities. While these sites are often password-protected, many feel uneasy posting family photos on the Internet. Further, it is often impossible to download and save images without paying a fee and it takes a tremendous amount of time to download an entire batch of pictures.
Using a small portable storage drive, you can securely share photographs with your friends and family for free.
1. Purchase a USB storage drive that has enough storage space to hold all of your images. These small devices are sometimes called flash drives, thumb drives, or jump drives. They are rewritable and range in storage capacity. Many can be attached to a key ring, making them highly portable and easy to carry.
2. Connect the flash drive to your computer via a USB port.
3. Locate the files that you wish to share on your hard drive. Highlight the selected files or folders that you wish to copy. To highlight more than one file at a time, hold down the control button while you select them.
4. On a Windows computer, go to My Computer to locate the portable drive. On a Mac, this folder should appear on your desktop once the device is attached. Open the folder.
5. Drag and drop the highlighted files into the portable device’s folder. Depending on the size of the files, it should take no more than one minute.
6. To retrieve the files on another computer, simply plug the flash drive into the device’s USB port. The folder should open automatically, but it can also be located on the desktop or in the My Computer folder. Once the folder is open and the files are visible, copy them to a permanent location on the computer’s hard drive. Using this simple method, photo-sharing is made extremely easy. Mailing a flash drive is quicker and easier than mailing a disk and does not require a large amount of uploading and downloading. It also helps to keep your family photos private and secure.