Member of the GigaTribe? Digital Photography Part 2

What to do with all those digital photographs? Sure, you want to look at them now and then. Sometimes you want to print them out and put them in photo albums the old-fashioned way. Other times you want to view them as a slideshow on the computer or TV. Or you purchased new digital pictures frames from vendors like Digital Foci and you enjoy a rotating cornucopia of memories. But at some point you want to share them.

But how do you do that, without endlessly printing and mailing, or shipping out USB drives loaded with photos? Most of us, if we are on our “A” game, are constantly snapping the best times of our lives—birthdays, sporting events, religious ceremonies, excursions at the beach. But many of us our caught “sans digitari” (I made that word up)—meaning we are without the digital means to capture the moment. This leads the family and friends around us to get copies of our work. We usually politely agree to share but how many of us actually follow through?

Well now we can. GigaTribe is a new digital file sharing service that has the potential to change the way we share precious memories with our loved ones. It combines the ability to share folders on your hard drive with high security and social networking tools to make it all very workable. There are no size limitations either, a major plus. And unlike those upload/pay/print sites like WalMart and other photo services that only let your friends download poor quality images (they want you to pay to print and ship the photos), GigaTribe lets you share the original files. And unlike social networking sites like FaceBook or MySpace, your contacts have no extra effort to save your photos to their hard drive-- it happens automatically in the background while your computer is turned on. FTP software is too complex. P2P solutions are not secure.

I had a chance to meet GigaTribe founder and CEO Stephane Herry and I must admit I was really impressed with the breadth and simplicity of what his team has put together. I was also surprised to learn that GigaTribe already has over a million users in Europe, but they have translated and completely re-worked the platform to increase its ease of use and bake in some advanced social networking concepts. It works on PC platforms (Mac and Linux to be released this year) and allows you to “friend” up to 500 people in a two-way sharing system for photos, videos, or any other document. Best of all the basic service is FREE. For $29.95 per year you also get GigaTribe Ultimate which has some incremental features that are not required but would be useful to power users (if you are interested in 3 free months of Ultimate click this link and use this promo code: GT3MCES).

The company is still small and the interface is fairly Spartan at the moment but who cares? Imagine if you could automatically update your loved ones with your digital highlights with no more effort than is already required to transfer your photos and videos from your device to your computer. All-File-Sharing + Easy-To-Use + Free + No-Extra-Effort = Why Not?