How to set-up a drop at drop.io for use with your clients

I recently released an export plug-in for Adobe Lightroom that allows you to upload your photos to drop.io, allowing you to collaborate with your clients and share photos with your family and friends.

I chose drop.io to deliver images to my clients because of the easy to use interface and ability to configure the look and feel of the drop (file sharing location).

Here are the steps I take to set-up a new drop for client use (click to read more).

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First step – go to http://drop.io and decide on a name for your drop.

In the big text box, type the name of the drop you to create.  I normally use <my name>_<client name>, for example “rusticolus_acmebooks”.

The text box should look something like this:

Notice that it has a green background – this means that the name is valid and available for you to use.  If there is a problem, the box turns red and the reason is stated below the box.

Skip over the other options for now and click the big green “Create A Drop” button.

This next bit is important – you want to have full control of your drop.

Specify a password and valid email address.  If you don’t do this, you can’t make the drop private or configure the look and feel.

Once you have sorted out the administrator access, click on the settings link in the top right corner.

Now you have a drop, the first thing to do is sort out your client’s access.

From the settings page, click Guest password, it is in the Access control section.  This is the password you send to your client to access the drop, so make it usable but secure.

Now click on Guest Permissions.

By default Guests have full access to the files in the drop.  You should change this depending on the client and your intention with the images.  Here are a couple of examples:

• Hi-res image delivery: comment, reorder, chat and download
• Interactive proof sheet: comment, reorder and chat.

The next step is to customise the drop to match your own branding.  Go to Customize and work your way down the options.  Remember that this controls how your drop will look to your client, so don’t get too carried away!

• Design: If you have a good background for your twitter account, this may work here too.
• Logo: This is displayed on the top of the right hand sidebar.
• Sidebar: Only show the widgets that you want to use with your client – less is more!
• Description: a brief description of what photos you are displaying or about you and your company
• Navigation: I prefer to use the simplified navigation – once again, less is more.
• Default view: I leave this as Media

And thats it!  You are now ready to upload files to your drop and share with your client.

In a lot of cases, 100Mb storage isn’t enough space to deliver those hi-res images, so don’t forget that you can buy a premium code to upgrade your drop to 1Gb of storage for only $10 – a tiny price to provide the extra value to your clients.

If you use Adobe Lightroom then you can upload your photos directly to the drop using the Photo-drop Lr export plug-in.  Not only does it upload photos to existing drops, it can create new drops and set the access controls with just a couple of mouse clicks.

Visit www.photo-drop.com and download the free trial now.

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Comments

[steve @drop.io]

hey - this is steve from drop.io - photographers use drop.io all the time and your plug-in is awesome!

If interested, take a look at a free trial of drop.io manager, which enables users to manage multiple drops, custom brand groups of drops, and make drops that are much larger than 100 Mbs - take a look:

http://drop.io/file/freetrialsignup

[Mark Wilson]

Thanks Steve.

I was planning a post about the manager sometime soon :)