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It really depends on the context.
FTP processing could be sending flowers to someone…
…or more likely it means “file transfer protocol”, which is a quick method of transferring files between computers, such as loading HTML pages and JPEGs onto a server to be displayed on a website.
FTP = File Transfer Protocol.
This is a TCP/IP Protocol for file exchange. Useful when transfering files over the internet between two different computers. One computer is the “server” the other is the “client” The server can be set up to require a user id and pw.
Typically we use FTP transfers for files or data that is too large for email - like more than 10 MB or so.
The context was sending pictures to a picture storage website photobucket.com.
Since you can upload pictures via an html page of theirs, is there any reason to use ftp? Or is it just the older technology?
The ftp protocol does pre-date the web, so in that respect, it is an older technology. There are still lots of uses for it, however. Not every site provides an html upload mechanism. Some sites provide them, but they’re poorly implemented, and make life very difficult (Comcast, for example). Finally, using a standalone ftp application, like WS_FTP (available here), sometimes results in much faster file transfers, because all of the “web” overhead is stripped away.
Chances are that the FTP, although ‘older technology’, would be faster. HTTP has a lot of extra stuff going on that are handy for a web page, with its lots of little bits and pieces, that are irrelevant to a straight upload. You can also script and automate FTP, which I doubt is possible on their web page.
So it comes down to how large are the files and how often you want to do it. I’m guessing that if you need to ask, then their web page will do the job just as well for you.
An example of how it is used. I’m building a web page, which uses lots of pdfs. There is no html mechanism to put the files on my web server. so I can ftp them to the proper place (and the html too) and voila, web site.
I’ve also used it to transfer design files showing a problem to a vendor. Updates can be ftp’ed back. The ftp site can be password protected, or open.
One of the things about ftp is that you can perform a limited set of command line things (like show a directory, change directories) but not too many.
Does FTP processing mean something specific?
If not, FTP is designed for putting files on other computers. It’s true that if you want to upload one thing web if probably easier because you don’t have to configure things.
But for, say, maintaining a local and remote directory the same, or browsing a very large remote directory, or other more intensive or specialised tasks an FTP application is more specialised and going to do it a lot better.
I’m curious about the term “processing”.
Could it possibly be “post-processing” you’re referring to?
Files that are stored on servers for download may be compressed, in any of a long series of formats, and may be encoded for 7-bit transfer purposes as well (although you don’t see so much of that any more). “Post-processing” can refer to the decoding and decompression of these files after download, and with some FTP clients can also be the routine by which the final file is handed off to other program to actually open or run.
A real-life example of all this might be a MacOS X application, distributed on a disk image (.dmg) file which has been compressed using the Stuffit compression scheme (so it’s a .sit file) and then BinHexxed to represent it as text (so now it’s a .hqx file). Your FTP client downloads the .hqx file, decodes it to create a .sit file, decompresses that to create the .dmg file, and then passes control of that file to the Disk Tools application which mounts it as a RAM disk, from where you can launch the application, try it out, and if you like it, copy it to your regular hard disk.