Monday, 23 November 2009
I'm a big fan of Microsoft's free synchronisation service Live Mesh. It makes syncing files between computers and backing up files in the cloud as simple as creating a folder. Once you've set up the folders you want to sync you don't need to do anything else, it's a do it once and forget about it service.
There is also a mobile client for Live Mesh that runs on Windows Phones and I use it to sync photos with my Windows Media Center, which also has Live Mesh installed. That's great, but what if you want others to be able to sync photos from a Blackberry or an iPhone? Well, the one thing that most phones have these days is the ability to send emails, so wouldn’t it be neat if you could simply email a file to your Media Center which would then get synced with all your other computers via Live Mesh? Well, here’s how to do it in a few easy steps.
First of all sign up at Live Mesh, download and install the software, add your computers to your Mesh and choose the folders you want to sync. Next, you’ll need an email account that will be used solely for sending photographs to. So head over to a free web mail service that supports POP, such as Gmail, and sign up for an account. To pick up the email and extract the photos, you’ll need an email client running on your computer (it doesn’t have to be a Windows Media Center PC, but as they are usually in a semi-standby mode most of the time and hooked up to TVs they’re ideal for this exercise). The only client I could find that supports this, by way of an add-on, is Thunderbird. It's free and open source and once you have it downloaded and installed, it's time for the next step, the automatic extraction of attachments from emails. For this you'll need the Thunderbird add-on Attachment Extractor. Be sure to download version 1.0, as later versions seem to have an issue with the automatic extraction of email attachments.
