Kwilt Shoebox

By Bayle Emlein

One of the things that I learned on October 28 at Pepcom’s
Holiday Spectacular in San Francisco is that I am not the only
person who would like an easier way to get photos off my
phone to share and to edit. It’s so easy to take picture after
picture after picture with my phone. And so hard to do anything
with them but share via social media. Kwilt offers a solution with
their Shoebox. (Rembember where Grandma kept the photos
that didn’t make it into the family album?)

The Kwilt Shoebox, along with its accompanying free app
for either Android or iOS, lets you turn any external drive
into your private cloud. While uploading photos to traditional
cloud storage seems like a good solution at first, management
of photos and albums can get cumbersome as your online
presence grows, it can get expensive especially after you pass
the first level of storage allowance, and you are dependent on
the service provider for access–and service.

Once you’ve purchased your Shoebox, you have no other
storage expenses unless you choose to add drives or USB
memory storage. There are no monthly fees. The Shoebox
acts a bit like a personal Network Attached Storage System
except that it does not require a dedicated server and it is
simple to set up and expand.  A user can associate his
account with several Shoeboxes sitting on any local or remote
networks. A Shoebox can also be associated with several users’
accounts to facilitate sharing or to coordinate records of different
activities. It bridges your USB storage devices to you anywhere.
Kwilt’s October 2017 partnership with  Netgear and DLink
including Kwilt compatibility into their routers means that users
simply need to connect a USB drive for their pictures to be
immediately available to their Kwilt account. A Mini HDMI port
on the Shoebox makes it easy to display those photos and
videos on the biggest screen you can find to bore, ehr entertain,
your friends and family with.