I’m in this situation now where I need to mail a physical letter, with which I want to include several dozen photos. Time was when I could have simply enclosed a DVD, but these days discs are pretty much done and it would be unwise to assume that the recipient will have a DVD drive.
So my next idea was to include a thumb drive, and that’s what I’ll end up doing in any case. But it seems that I have to give away a 16G drive that costs eight or ten bucks, as opposed to a disc that would have cost a few cents. That would be fine, but it’s likely that I’ll want to be able to give additional copies of the pictures to more people, which means the expense would mount up. And while the number of pictures involved is far too many to print out conveniently, they still only amount to about half a gig. It seems ridiculous to give away a 16G drive to provide half a gig of photos.
I’m probably misremembering, but I thought the office supply and electronics stores used to have low capacity thumb drives available for a couple dollars, but I certainly 't find them now.
“…but these days discs are pretty much done and it would be unwise to assume that the recipient will have a DVD drive.”
I disagree with this. I think you would be pretty safe sending a disc to almost anyone, unless you knew for certain that they would be looking at it on a mobile device. I’ve never had a disc recipient tll me they didn’t have a reader drive.
Tastes of Chocolate is right about small capacity flash memory sticks. You can also look for “thumb drives in bulk.” I picked up 50 256Mb drives for $25 a few months ago.
I don’t know… I’ve got three PCs (self-built desktop, Surface Pro, and a work-provided Dell ultrabook. None of them have DVD drives. Nothing Apple has sold in the past couple years has had an DVD drive. I would still expect that the majority of recipients would have access to one, but there’s a decent and increasing likelihood that they might not.
At my wife’s workplace, they changed their logo so she brought me home a few dozen 8GB drives with the old logo on them. She said management said to throw them out…
Have you considered an account on one of the sharing sites like Photobucket or Shutter fly? They are free. You just up load your photos and your friends can download as desired. Even Walgreens let’s you upload for free and others can download or order prints to be picked up at their nearest store. Walmart may also have similar.