Do your huge files keep bouncing back to you on email? Jonathan Parkyn shows you how to break through the size barrier
E-mailing attachments to friends and family is a quick and easy way to share photos, documents and much more. But if you’ve ever tried to attach anything larger than a few megabytes, you’ll know that email isn’t necessarily the best way to share big files – they often just bounce right back with a big, shouty ‘UNDELIVERABLE’ stamped all over the subject field.
So, what do you do if you want to send that large video clip of the family you filmed over Christmas, or a sprawling album of recent holiday photos? Well, don’t go popping USB sticks in the post just yet; here are some easy ways to send big files to anywhere in the world – and it won’t cost you a penny.
Add files from cloud storage to webmail
As a rule, webmail services tend to be more generous than standard email services when it comes to large attachments. Gmail currently has an attachment limit of 25MB, while Outlook.com lets you send files up to 20MB. However, just because you can send large attachments, it doesn’t always mean that the recipient will get them. If you are sending from Gmail, say, to someone whose email service caps attachments at a lower size, then your 25MB files could end up being rejected by your recipient’s servers.
Both Gmail and Outlook.com offer a clever way around this. You can insert files (up to 10GB) from online storage instead of attaching them. In Gmail, once you’ve typed your message, instead of clicking the paperclip icon to attach a file, click the Google Drive icon next to it. Click Upload, then ‘Select files from your computer’ and navigate to the file on your computer. Highlight it and click OK, then click Upload. Once it’s uploaded, click Send. It doesn’t matter what your recipient’s attachment limit is. They don’t even need a Google Drive account – select the ‘Anyone with the link: Can view’ option when prompted, then click ‘Share & send’. The recipient will receive a link to view or download the file.
You can do the same in Outlook.com by clicking Insert, followed by ‘Share from OneDrive’ when composing your message.
Send directly from cloud storage
But what if you don’t use Gmail or Outlook.com? No problem, you can still send people large files via cloud storage. With Dropbox, for example, you can share a file from within the service itself or create a link that you can send by email.
You will need a Dropbox account, however, but it’s free and straightforward – sign up at www.dropbox.com. Next, sign in, click Upload and add the file you want to share. Once it’s been uploaded, click the file, then click the Share button to the right. A window will then open showing a link to the file – if you want, you can just copy and paste this link into an email.
Alternatively, type the email addresses of your intended recipients in the box under ‘Share this link to’ and Dropbox will send a message for you. Either way, your recipients will be able to use the link provided to download the file directly from your Dropbox themselves – even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.
You can upload files of up to 10GB via the Dropbox web interface and there’s no file-size limit if you use Dropbox’s desktop tool (www.dropbox.com/install) or mobile app. The size of the files you upload or share is, ultimately, limited by the size of your storage, and Dropbox only offers 2GB of space for free. If you regularly send files larger than this, you could consider paying for more space, or you could use Google Drive instead, which provides 15GB of free storage and has similar sharing options.
Send via a file-transfer service
If you don’t have a cloud-storage account (or would rather not use it for sharing files), then you could opt for a dedicated file-transfer service, such as WeTransfer (www.wetransfer.com), MailBigFile (www.mailbigfile.com) or Hightail (www.hightail.com). These services let you upload large files and send a notification to recipients telling them to download it. All three offer both free and paid-for services. Hightail’s free offering is the most restrictive because you need to sign up for an account before you can send anything, plus individual file sizes are limited to a maximum of 250MB. You can send 2GB files in WeTransfer and MailBigFile without even registering.
Post it on YouTube - privately
If the files you want to send are videos or photos, then you may not need to send them at all. Instead you could post them online, either on a social network, such as Facebook, or on video and photosharing services, such as YouTube (www.youtube.com) and Flickr (www.flickr.com).
In most cases, photos and videos you upload to services such as these are made public by default, but it’s possible to make them private and only allow specific people you’ve invited to view them. With YouTube, for instance, upload your video file, then log into your Video Manager page, click the video, then click Edit. Select Private from the dropdown menu in the lower section of the page, then type the email addresses of anyone you want to invite to view the clip and click Share.
Send via BitTorrent (it is legal)
Don’t worry, we’re not advocating illegal file sharing. Peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent aren’t actually illegal in themselves, and were originally designed for exactly the purpose we’re describing – transferring large files securely and quickly for non-commercial reasons.
Sending files via torrents is completely free. There are no size limits or timeouts, and you don’t have to worry about privacy because you’re sharing files directly, rather than storing them on someone else’s servers. The only downside is that you and everyone you send files to requires a special tool called a torrent client, such as uTorrent (download free from www.utorrent.com, making sure you deselect any unwanted extras while installing).
Managing torrents can get a bit technical, too – you may need to configure firewalls and open ports on your PC – so we wouldn’t recommend this route unless you and your friends regularly need to share large files.