You should have your own ‘Permanent Public Folder’ folder for files you want to share.

Don’t use something like Dropbox or Imgur. They might work now. But eventually they won’t.

Instead, have them hosted in a folder on a domain you own.

And then:

• Never change the domain.
• Never delete/rename/move a file.

In my case, I use elliotclowes.com. It’s not the shortest or coolest domain I own. But I’m never going to get rid of it.

I use the folder /cold. It doesn’t make much sense. Cold storage is storage that’s not frequently accessed and is often stored on offline drives or CDs. But it makes sense to me, and I know to never delete it or touch it. Use whatever works for you.

Avoid using subfolders. There’s too much temptation to then move or sort files later on. I originally put files in yearly subfolders based on the year I uploaded them. I don’t anymore. But I won’t move anything. I’ve done it now and I’m not going to change it. Remember: never delete/rename/move a file.

Also avoid checking the folder. You’ll inevitably see a file called UNADJUSTEDNONRAW_thumb_69b5.jpg that is an image of a grape and be tempted to delete it.

I admit, this isn’t the right solution for everyone.

If you’re sharing large video files, the storage and bandwidth costs might be too high.

When you share a file with something like Dropbox, it will often nicely copy the link to your clipboard. That won’t happen here.

Uploading from your phone can be annoying – though there are now plenty of apps for uploading to SFTP servers or S3.

It can even be annoying on a computer, to be fair. But software like ExpanDrive and Mountain Duck will let you access your server from the file system. Then you can just drag and drop files.

You could also ask an LLM like GPT-4 to create a shell script for you to upload the files. That’s what I do. When Hazel sees a new file in the folder it runs a shell script that uses the AWS CLI to upload it (here’s my .sh file).