Filepicker.io (YC S12) lets content flow without worrying about bandwidth

After I signed up to this, I started getting an e-mail everyday. All e-mails are titled like "Do you need help?" "Let's get you started with filepicker" etc etc. WTF is this? What is this rush for? I just gave a try your app, that's it. It sounded useful at first but you are losing respect by spamming.

Can't recommend Filepicker enough. If your product involves any sort of document/photo access, you should try them out! I've been using it for a few months and have been pleased with the integration friendliness for a web-first developer like myself, the enthusiastic support (of course, small team, we'll how it scales), and variety of services connected. I especially like the "filter services by mime type" feature. The "save to" is massively useful from a consumer perspective as well.<p>Edit: A bit more context more my enthusiasm.

I like the concept of filepicker.io: a standardized widget for providing files that handles local files, remote URLs, and services people use. However, every time I read the phrase "by inserting a few lines into their source code", I think 'yeah, and one of those is a script tag pointing at a third-party server'. And sure enough, looking at the documentation, I see exactly that.<p>I really wish web services would start providing instructions for self-hosting all scripts.

When I first heard of filepicker.io I thought it was a stupid idea. File uploads aren't hard to do, after all, so why pay a third party service for it? However, used Filepicker at the NY eCommerce Hackathon recently because we needed to implement file uploads in a hurry and was very impressed with it.<p>Took about 5 minutes to get image uploads enabled in our web app, including allowing people to take pictures directly from a webcam. No screwing around with file POSTs, sanitizing, storage, CDNs etc.<p>Looking forward to using it in a real project.

Getting customer data into your system is harder than it looks. Flash uploaders are pretty crappy, but you need them for IE users and direct to S3. Flash is broken for mobile, of course, as is the whole 'upload from computer' concept. Box, DropBox, Google Drive, flickr, and everything else is extremely popular, so if you start implementing all those yourself it adds significant development time and code to maintain. Filepicker has been a huge win for us at PlanGrid.

That explains why nearly every Filepicker blog post makes it to the front page! :)