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How To

How to: store screenshots and iPhotos in Dropbox

Pier Francesco Piccolomini

Pier Francesco Piccolomini

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Dropbox has added two new features to its service. You can now save screenshots directly in the cloud, and transfer photos from iPhoto to your remote folder in one click.

Cloud storage services come and go. New services are being developed all the time, but most are eventually forgotten. Others seem to offer features that already exist.

How to: store screenshots and iPhotos in Dropbox

This isn’t the case with Dropbox. Since 2008, when Dropbox was first released, developers have innovated and expanded the service, and, most importantly, have made it easy to use with any device and on any platform.

The two most recent innovations are the ability to save screenshots and sync iPhoto with Dropbox, two additional steps toward the relocation of all user data to the cloud.

Your screenshots in the cloud

Saving snapshots of your screen to an online space with Dropbox is very simple. Once you’ve downloaded the latest version of the Dropbox client (for PC or for Mac), the screen displayed when launching is as follows:

Click on Save Screenshots to Dropbox. Now every time you use the Print Screen/SysRq key (or Print Screen, depending on the keyboard you use), the screenshot will automatically be added to your Dropbox folder and synced.

You can enable this function at any time in Preferences, located in the system tray.

Check the “Share screenshots box using Dropbox” on the Import tab.

There’s another new feature that makes the new version of Dropbox particularly useful. If you press the CTRL key along with the Print Screen key, the screenshot will be saved in Dropbox and copied to the clipboard. Then you’ll get a download link that you can paste into an email, Facebook, or other applications.

Sync with iPhoto

If you have iPhoto 7.0 or higher installed on your Mac, you can now save pictures in your library to Dropbox.

In Preferences > Import, click the ‘Import Photos from iPhoto’ button.

Follow the steps and wait for the upload to be completed.

The first import you do creates a folder in Dropbox called Photos from iPhoto, where your pictures will be stored as they are in iPhoto, as well as sorted by events.

The new features are easy to use and work well. The quality and continuous improvements offered by Dropbox make it a really popular program that’s quickly rounding up a loyal following.

It’s not easy to convince a user to give up the traditional way of storing files locally in favor of relying on the cloud. Users have to overcome a general distrust of such services that they aren’t familiar with and don’t fully understand.

Dropbox, however, has made sure that the management of remote file storage looks and feels like the classic local storage methods users are familiar with by using a similar folder interface and making access from many devices easy to use.

If you’re trying to navigate through the endless suppliers of online storage services and you want to choose one that’s right for you, check out our comparison of cloud storage services.

Original article written by Pier Francisco Piccolomini for Softonic IT.

Pier Francesco Piccolomini

Pier Francesco Piccolomini

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