How sharing works

CloudFire is built on a peer-to-web (p2web) model that blurs the boundaries between the desktop and the web. You share your photos and videos from your desktop and they seamlessly appear on the web. Here's what happens when you share your photos and videos:

1 - Share photos and videos

Photos shared in CloudFire are automatically resized to various sizes to fit different screen displays. The originals are preserved. Videos are automatically transcoded (if needed) into a web optimized format (H.264 with fast-start) that plays in all standard web browsers (with Flash support). Any metadata like tags and captions in your files are preserved. All this happens locally on your machine in the background and is pretty fast. Video transcoding can take a little longer to complete depending on the size of your movie, but it too happens in the background so you don't have to wait on it.

2 - Notify friends, Cache photos and videos

Once your photos and videos have been shared, CloudFire optionally notifies your friends via email or Facebook if you setup it up to do this. You can also manually send out emails with a link to your gallery, album, or movie. At the same time, your newly shared files are cached onto CloudFire servers over a secure encrypted connection. The caching operation can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours to complete depending on how much content you shared and the speed of your Internet connection. This DOES NOT, however, prevent your visitors from viewing your gallery. We'll see how later.

3 - Store in Amazon S3, Publish to Facebook

As the files are received on our servers, we move them to Amazon's network of datacenters. Amazon is the gold standard in safe data storage. CloudFire optionally also publishes your files to Facebook, if you setup your gallery for Autoposting to Facebook.

How viewing works

Your shared galleries can be viewed in any standard web browser. We optimize the content for various screen sizes and devices in order to deliver the best online viewing experience. Here's what happens when a visitor accesses your gallery:

1 - Visitor requests gallery page from web browser

The web request is sent to our CloudFire servers. If the gallery is password protected, the visitor is prompted for a password.

2 & 3 - Fetch content

After the visitor has been authenticated, CloudFire then fetches the requested content from potentially multiple sources. If the request has already been cached, it is fetched from Amazon's secure datacenters. Otherwise, it is fetched directly from your computer over a secure encrypted connection.

4 - Return results to web browser

If the content does get fetched from your computer, it is cached immediately so subsequent requests for this file are fetched from the cache and not your computer. As content is received from the data source, it is streamed back to the visitor's web browser.

Questions

Is my computer secure?

You'll notice from the diagrams that your computer is only directly accessed by CloudFire servers. This is a crucial design philosophy as your computer is NEVER publicly accessible to the outside world. All transport of files and metadata occurs over a secure outbound connection from your computer to a CloudFire server. You never have to open any firewall holes or configure your router to make CloudFire work. This connection is secured and encrypted using 256-bit SSL.

Having all traffic flow through our servers further allows us to centrally monitor all requests and stop any malicious activity in their tracks.

Do I have to leave my computer online all the time?

You only need to leave your computer online long enough for your shared content to get cached. After that, any requests to your files are fetched from the Amazon cache. If your computer goes offline before the caching is completed, your gallery will still show whatever got cached before the interruption. When you come back online, the caching process will pick up where it left off.

Got more questions?

• Drop us an email,
• Or call us: 1.800.381.7241.