The Solution

Yesterday afternoon was spent researching a way to send the massive file of all the photos and illustrations for the book back to the book designer, once I finally finished making revisions to all of them. Originally I loaded the book including all the images on a thumb drive and mailed it up to him. Obviously from a time and money standpoint I would prefer not to use that method again if I can avoid it. I thought the free answer was going to be to upload all the photos and illustrations to my Mobile Me account, which I have had since last year and never used. Any uploaded data is stored in the "cloud" and you can give others permission to access your account. Sounds perfect, right? Unfortunately, Mobile Me does not support tiffs, which is the format the designer asked me to reformat all the illustrations into. Bummer!

My daughter suggested uploading my file to the ftp on my website, myhousehistory.net. That would be great if I even had a clue what that was all about. I did a google search on it and realized that once again I was in over my head. My husband also suggested that I bring the file to his office and upload it to their ftp on their server. But that would mean giving the designer access to their server, which I wasn't 100% comfortable with.

So here is what ending up working. There is a website called yousendit.com. I first zipped my file folder (super easy in Windows - just right click the file, click on zip and you're done!) and then went to the yousendit website. Because my file was in excess of 100mb (which is the "free" threshold), I incurred a charge of $9.99 to send the file. But that is less than a new thumb drive plus the postage to mail it, not to mention the mailing time delay. It took about an hour for the file to upload and be sent, and I got an email confirmation that it went to my recipient. I haven't heard back from the designer yet, so hopefully everything transferred okay. If it did, this will be my preferred method of sharing information, especially since I think most items that I will ever need to send will be under the 100mb threshold.