Sharing photos with the lab (or anyone else) using Dropbox

If you're like me, you take lots of photos of yourpatients. If you're also like me, you find sharing them with the lab to be a bit of a chore.

I won't explain how to take photos. I'm clearly not qualified for that. I will tell you that smart peoplewho know better than I do have told me not to bother printing digital photos and sending them tothe lab. Dr. Mike DiTolla recently opined in episode 14 of the DentalHacks podcast (shameless plug)that if you aren't springing for the right kind of printer paper and an expensive photo printer thenyour printed photos aren't very helpful to a lab technician trying to match your shade.

But if you've ever tried to email photos to the lab you'll find that the size of the photos that mostdigital cameras take is huge. Typically we're talking several MB per photo when you're taking highquality photos. So attaching them to email is a pain. Many email servers won't allow you to sendemails multiple files attached to them that are that large.

I've solved this problem using Dropbox. I've been a Dropbox Pro member for several years. I've paid

$99/year for 100 GB of cloud storage that I can access on any device. It's been handy. This year Istarted to approach 70% of my 100GB and was wondering what I would do once I got close. Thefolks at Dropbox fixed that problem before I ever really approached it by upgrading the Pro level to 1TB of cloud storage. Same $99/year with 10x the storage. With that much storage, you can afford tobe a little sloppy with it!

Anyhow, Dropbox allows you to share photos or folders with multiple photos with a simple link. Takea look at this short video tutorial for details. The video assumes that you've got a working Dropboxaccount and you have a photo somewhere on Dropbox that you'd like to send.

By uploading your photos to Dropbox you make it possible to share that photo with a simple link,rather than attaching it to an email. Even better you can put several photos in a folder and share theentire folder with a link. All the sudden you aren't trying to figure out which photo or which angle isthe best for the lab. Send them all and give the lab as much information as possible!

If you have any questions about how to use Dropbox toshare photos or suggestions of other ways to useDropbox to simplify your workflow leave them in thecomments!

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