New Stuff: File Descriptions
Since we can’t stand to go a few days without rolling out a new feature, here’s the next one: File Descriptions. In what I think is the most useful feature we’ve added since launch, the descriptions allow you to give your file a more elegant title than the filename itself, and also act as photo captions for your images. Let’s start our slideshow of the changes with the new upload form:
Each file now has its own “description” field — totally optional, but very useful as well. Just fill it in with whatever you want, and upload away! You might also notice that the description fields in the “multiple files” section aren’t displayed by default — they will appear once you browse for a file in each field.
Once you’ve uploaded a file or two, head over to the dashboard and check out our beautiful new “edit description” icon, the blue pencil. Just click on that to pop out your editing dialog — and remember that this works for old files, too. If you want to get rid of a description altogether, just erase it and click “save”.
Next up, we’ll check out the download page. For files, such as the MP3 below, the description shows up just below the “Download [filename]…” header. Here’s an example:
And on images, the description acts as a caption, allowing me to add some real captions to my Italy album rather than just displaying the filenames assigned by my digital camera. Here’s an example of that one:
So, there’s a simple but very functional new tool to help you get the most out of your DivShare experience. The dashboard search will cover file descriptions now, too, so that should help you keep things a little more organized. And, as you will probably notice throughout the week, this is just one step toward a very cool feature we’re going to be adding within the next week or two — a new, social, searchable section of DivShare. We’ll expand more on this idea as we put the pieces together with each new feature, so for now, just imagine the possibilities :).
Hit us up with your feedback below, and go describe some files!
January 31st, 2007 at 2:45 am
Sweet. Now only if you could throw in Virtual Folders (based on tags) and allow zipped downloads of entire virtual folders (with resume support) - this would be a killer service.
January 31st, 2007 at 4:11 am
Any chance of a “Save All Changes” button? At the moment every time one edits one description one has to start over - re-navigating back to page of files one was working on.
Much better if one could open all edit boxes at once, edit all descriptions and only then save them all together!
January 31st, 2007 at 4:23 am
Are you also going to let us Name our albums? And group other files into Folders which could then also be Named?
January 31st, 2007 at 6:32 am
What if you already have a huge gallery with graphic files named like DSC00xxx.JPG? It gets a bit of a dayjob to give a description if you can’t see them at the same time. It would be nice doing this from within the gallery.
Still, good idea. No problem with other files.
January 31st, 2007 at 7:30 am
Good point Ken!! Hadn’t spotted that one (my photo files already had semi-descriptive names). So for mine, I would just be removing underscores etc.
Even for future files - if divShare do at some point put on a feature to upload a folder at a time - then it would be essential subsequently to be able to see each image as one edited the descriptive name.
February 1st, 2007 at 4:11 am
I agree with Soum (#1), feature to tag the file is a must.
February 4th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Just a question, but why wouldnt you rename your files BEFORE you upload them? Am I missing something here? When I download mine from my digital camera, I put them in dated and/or named folders. In those folders I have my images renamed from the standard tag and date that my camera puts to something that I can easily find. Why would you depend on a free (albeit wonderful!) service to do this for you. We want to keep this service free right? Why not take a few steps to help yourselves? Thanks for reading :))
February 5th, 2007 at 7:27 am
@Lori: You’re absolutely right. There’s no complaining, I just ment that, before this renaming feature was added, it could be that people had already uploaded a lot of digital photos with these default names. Well, that’s just bad luck then ;-). Anyway, renaming them before uploading is obviously a better idea.
My appreciation to divShare and greetings from the Netherlands!
February 6th, 2007 at 3:28 am
Lori -
Whilst I see what you mean, there are some types of pictures where speed would initially be “of the essence”, so one would want to get them uploaded as quickly as possible for others to see (so therefore with original filenames straight out of camera).
But then, when there was time, it would be nice to rename the files already uploaded to divShare to give them proper descriptions - and to do that it really would only be practical to do (if there were many files) if it were done from a screen where one could see the image - at least a thumbnail - not just a list of filenames.
Jeremy
February 8th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Hey guys…
Im all for whatever you guys do with YOUR site. No matter what,
we still benefit due to the fact that we have a great place to
upload our files! I think its nice you guys are trying to make
improvements for your members and I thank you for it!