In my FileFactory links yesterday I asked about WeTransfer. I ultimately decided to give one of their pro accounts a try. You can get a one-month subscription for something like $12 bucks. I hope you all don’t mind, but I used some of the PayPal money you gave me at the last begging.
Unfortunately, I don’t think WeTransfer will work for me.
The pricing is actually really good. You can get unlimited storage for $19/month. I’ve downloaded from WeTransfer before and their speeds have always been great. As far as I can tell they don’t spam you with pop-ups or faulty links and they don’t make anybody jump through any hoops before they can download. I played with it a little last night and the upload speeds are fast.
All of that is great, it got me excited about using them. But then I discovered the downsides.
I tried uploading an unzipped folder. The upload worked fine, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to view the contents of the folder once it is uploaded. One of the things I love about Google Drive is that if I upload a folder then you can open that folder up in Google Drive. You can view the files, even read text files and see the images. I believe you can even play a FLAC file online. All of that is super helpful in determining whether or not you actually want to download the files.
As far as I can tell you can’t do that with WeTransfer. It appears that I can’t even do that on my end, as the uploader. That sucks.
There doesn’t seem to be any sort of file management system either. With Amazon Drive, File Factory, Google Drive and every other cloud storage system that I’ve used you have been able to manage your files when you uploaded them. I could create an artist folder and then move all the shows by that artist into them. I could sort by file name, date created, or other things. This is really helpful when you’ve uploaded thousands of files.
There also doesn’t seem to be a way of sharing multiple files at once, unless you upload them at the same time and then you cannot share individual files that were uploaded in a batch. So if I upload a Bob Dylan show right now and then one in an hour and another one later today, I can’t share all three of those shows with one link. Now if I upload those three shows at the same time WeTransfer will give me one link that will encompass all three shows. But if I only want to share one of the three shows, there doesn’t seem to be a method of doing that. And those files are permanently stuck together in WeTransfer’s filing system. When I look at all of my transfers, any files I uploaded at the same time I permanently batched together so that I can’t see everything unless I click on its button.
I’m probably not explaining that well. Ultimately, WeTransfer doesn’t have a good filing system for the files I upload. That’s a deal breaker for me. I need to be able to organize the files I upload. Now, if I’m not mistaken WeTransfer has only recently developed a pro-account system. I believe that previously everything was deleted after seven days. So they never needed to develop a good organizational system. They do have something called Portals which kind of leans towards the organization, but it is really set up for companies to collaborate on projects with all of their employees, and so it doesn’t really work for what I’m doing. But maybe as they grow they will find a better way for users to organize their files.
I’ll keep an eye on them for sure.