Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

This material is excerpted from the forthcoming book Displaying & Sharing your Digital Photographs. If you would like to be notified when the book is published click the link below to send me an e-mail: E-mail me when the Displaying & Sharing book is published To see the book's tentative table of contents, click the link below: Show me the table of contents for the Displaying and Sharing book

Napster may have bit the dust but peer-to-peer software lives on. Programs such as Morpheus, Gnutella, Grockster, and Kaaza are used mainly by high school and college kids to steal music from each others computers, but these programs also have other legal purposes. For example, you can use one of the peer-to-peer programs to give people access to all of the digital images on your computer. If you're not in the mood to give your photos away to people you don't know, you can still share them privately. One program that lets you do this is Vibe's Internet Media Pad. With this program you begin by copying the images or other files you want to share into specially created and password-protected Vibe folders on your computer. Only the files you copy into these folders can be viewed or listened to by visitors from remote computers. They can’t see or access any of the other files or folders on your computer.

The Vibe Internet Pad displaying thumbnail images of files on the drive.

When you’re away from home, you can use any computer with an Internet connection, even a libraries, to access your images. You just use the browser to go to your assigned Vibe Web address that is in the form of "your name.vibeuser.com." The Vibe Internet Media Pad then appears in the remote computer’s browser with your images displayed. You can view them as a list of files with details such as dates and sizes, as thumbnails, or even as a slide show. To share your photos with others, you click an Invitation button on the Media Pad and send them an e-mail invitation. When they click a link in the message they receive, their browser automatically goes to the site and displays the Internet Media Pad. They can then view the images the same way you can. At the time you invite them, you can give them permission to download the files or not. If you don’t, they can view your images but copies are not transferred to their computer, so even low-resolution copies of your files are not made available.

If you have ever tied to share photos with friends or family, you know what a challenge it is. You can upload them to an on-line sharing service, e-mail them one at a time, or put them on a CD and deliver them. All of these methods are time-consuming and filled with potential problems. To access your files on an on-line service means the visitor has to register—something many people are loath to do. Visitors can also always download low-resolution versions of the images because they are displayed on the screen. If you send e-mail attachments, you’re possibly choking someone’s system if they don’t have a cable or DSL connection. You have to check their address, guess if it’s high-speed or not, and then reduce the file’s size if they are on AOL or some other dial-up service. If you create a CD you either have to hand deliver or mail it. With Vibe you can avoid all of these problems.

To use Vibe, your computer must be running Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP, have a high-speed Internet connection, and, of course the computer has to be on when a visitor comes calling. Visitors just need a recent version of the Internet Explorer or Netscape Web browser and at least a dial up Internet connection. If you are sharing your videos and music, and want visitors to be able to see or hear them, their computer must also be equipped with the Microsoft Media Player and have a high-speed Internet connection.