cloud storage

Gavin Wade had an idea and he ran with it.

As a photographer, he wanted to quickly and painlessly deliver his client's photographs. He wanted to upload his images once and then be able to deliver different versions to different clients. His solution: Cloud Spot.

I trust you have affiliates or business partners who simply have different needs for your photographs and they don't all fit neatly into one standard dimension. Imgaine you are a wedding photographer who has just photographed a Jewish wedding and you have some photographs of the huppa. Some of your wedding vendor friends will only need a postage sized version of the images, while the wedding planner you are wooing might want the photographs with your watermark to display on her Facebook page.

Do you sit there scaling up and scaling down the same photographs as and when someone requests it? It wouldn't be very efficient use of your time, right? That's where Cloud Spot excels.

I spoke with Gavin Wade about Cloud Spot and how it has saved his wedding photography business tons of time. Give this interview a listen and see if Cloud Spot is something you want to consider using for your photography business as well:

Setting up your Cloud Spot account is super easy:

Ever wanted to send some of your special clients discount codes? Well, you can now with Cloud Spot:

Your online store's back end should look this easy to manage:

There are six pricing options, including one that is totally FREE (jpeg imaages only). The Entry option is only $4/month and allows you to store and share JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, PSD, AI and PDF files. Granted you only get 5gb of space, but if your photography business is just starting up, this should do really well for you for now. You can always scale up!

Gavin has generously offered all Tiffinbox readers a special discount code. Use: tiffin10 – good for any monthly or annual plan when you sign up here.

A few days ago, I ran out of space on my Dropbox account. It wasn't intentional but I received a pleasant reminder from the service to upgrade. While the service is exceptional (one can access files from any connected computer, iPad or iPhone), it's much too easy to simply throw all kinds of data up to it and then forget about it.

So, I looked at the upgrade options and felt that the 50gb at $99/year would make most sense. Then I wondered what I had “dropped” into that box. Most of the files were old – images I had shared with family or friends and were no longer needed. So, I went on a mission to simply prioritize and delete those large files one by one. Well, believe it or not, by the time I was done, I was back down to using only 1gb of space.

Did I now feel like I needed 50gb of space? Unlikely. So, that's how I saved myself $99.

All of this was inspired by a blog post and video that Musea posted called “29 Ways To Stay Creative.” Check it out.

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

One of the ways the video suggests one can stay in the creative zone is to have a clutter free desktop. More easily said than done but when I also read that studies have shown how a cluttered lifestyle can increase blood pressure, I got to really thinking about how I can pare things down around me and in the cloud.

So, the first thing I did was to deal with my Dropbox account. If I had sprung for the $99 upgrade and had 50gb to play with, I would have likely just stuffed that server with more data files. Was my approach creative or just practical? I think a little bit of both.

By the way, if you don't have a free Drobox account already and want one, click here. That 2gb of space may just be all that you need.

How do you stay creative? Do you have a process that you can share with us that works for you? Is exorcising clutter your goal too? Share your comments below. I am attacking my email inbox next.

Online Proofing & Digital Delivery Thanks To Cloud Spot

Photographers, How Do You Stay Creative?