A couple of years ago Dan and I spent a weekend developing a simple way to send large files over the web.  We documented the 20 hours of development we spent on creating the file transfer service and the result, TransferBigFiles.com, turned out to be a very popular site.  In fact, we never did much to promote it and the servers that run the site probably hit their limit more than a year ago.  Since its creation more than 1 Million files have been downloaded from TransferBigFiles totaling more than 97 Terabytes of data (that's 97,000,000 MB!!!).  We think that's nuts, especially considering we only spent a weekend on it.

So a couple of months back, we got this itch to improve the service.  So this time around, David and I started to make some really cool improvements to the site with some graphics work from Angelo.  But as we were creating all these cool new features and a super-easy system-tray client to send files, we realized that the service would be ideal as a specialized photo transfer tool.  So on the road to improve TransferBigFiles.com (the improvements will still come, but they got delayed a bit), we have created the world's easiest way to create and share a photo album.  We call the new service PhotoDrop.com.

You don't believe me?  Watch this (YouTube Video, if reading with RSS reader, click article to see the video or go directly to the video):

If you don't think that PhotoDrop is the easiest way to send full-resolution photos to someone (and for free!), I challenge you to name another site that can do it as easily. Now, before you write your comment naming off Flickr or PhotoBucket or whatever your favorite photo service is, take the time to actually send some pictures through one of these sites, then do it through PhotoDrop.com.  Count the steps required and the user-time it takes to actually send the files, create the album and share the URL.

We are so excited about this service that we got brand new state-of-the-art servers dedicated to hosting PhotoDrop.com.  One of the coolest parts of the PhotoDrop service is that we use a combination of our own and Amazon's S3 for photo storage.  We think we've created some really cool technologies around the site that make it very unique.  Hopefully I'll blog more about that stuff later.

So check it out, the world's easiest way to Create and Share Photo Albums.

One more thing...the service is 100% free, but we've decided to donate $0.05 (a nickel) for EVERY photo album that's created through the PhotoAlbum DropZone tool and shared with at least one person (we're limiting it to $1,000 donation per month).  We haven't picked a charity yet, but it will likely be a local chapter of a reputable organization such as St. Vincent de Paul.

P.S. Those of you who are reading this and thinking "Hamid, shouldn't you be working on OnTime?" don't worry!  I'm giving myself far too much credit for PhotoDrop.com.  David Higgins has done most of the hard work and we've been busy building some great new features and fixing a lot of minor bugs with OnTime 2007 V7.1.  I'll be making an exciting announcement about that soon.