To make it even easier to transfer files, we’ve added the ability to Drag & Drop files with PixtaSynapse .   This feature is available via newer versions of web-browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Using Drag & Drop is simple, just select the file(s) you want from the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer and Drag the files from that window to the Drop region of the PixtaSynapse transfer page.  Release and you will see the list of all files dropped.  Enter the name and email address of who is transferring files and click the “Go” button and the transfer begins.

Drag & Drop makes it easy to send multiple files and we highly recommend taking it for a test-drive.

Based on feedback we’ve gotten from our customers, wanting more control over email notification to users, we’ve built in an easy way for people to send files directly to a specific user of a PixtaSynapse account.

In the past, email notifications would have to the account holder and any users they delegated to received messages.   This was sort of a shotgun blast of emails excluding no one.  We’ve refined this so that now customers can upload files, and notes, to a specific user within the account group.  Sending notifications specifically to those who need to receive the file.

Assuming that you’ve already setup some users of PixtaSynapse within your account,  here’s how to enable this feature:

Sign-in to your PixtaSynapse account and goto users.

Click on Account Settings -> Users

Click the checkbox: “Visible on the public upload page?”

Enable visibility for a user Dropbox

Click on the “update” button.

Now when someone goes to your Dropbox to send you files, on the 2nd step/pane, they’ll see a pop-up menu of all visible users you’ve enabled.   When your customer selects a user to send to, they will be sending an email notification to that user when the file transfer is complete.  The owner of the PixtaSynapse account will also receive an email as a carbon copy.

How to send a file to a specific employee at your company

Why is this useful?

Because, now, the specific user of your account will receive the notification first.  For example,  when people upload files for GiantPicture, they send then to Josh, who is the Production Manager.  Since the file is now being sent directly to Josh,  he will receive an email right after the file arrives, as well as the account holder (as a backup).

The backup is helpful if a customer sends a file directly to Josh who happens to be out-of-the-office, or on vacation not reading email.  Since PixtaSynase automatically delivers upload notification email to the account holder as well, you’ll still have a chain of response to act on the inbound file, without files dropping into the ether.

We have an update to PixtaSynapse coming this evening which incorporates a few minor fixes and adds a new feature to make it easier to send specific users files.  More on this shortly…

Today we updated our old, tired, PDF renderer.  Our new renderer is really fast, color accurate and renders very nice looking thumbnails.  It’s a nice improvement in both speed and quality.

To honor an old workhorse that worked for many years to send large files, we released a huge update to PixtaSynapse last Saturday April 16th (The 40th birthday of FTP).  While FTP was great in the 70′s the PixtaSynapse update contains a ton of improvements to make transferring large-graphic images even better:

1. Drag & Drop user interface
2. Thumbnail view of most graphic file formats (including vector and raster formats)
3. Virus checking of all files send through PixtaSynapse
4. Redesigned Interface
5. Searching enabled for the Inbox
6. Video help files
7. Traffic-shaped file transfers to make transferring files faster
8. More storage and lowered-pricing
9. and lots more

There were so many changes coming in this release that we built and maintained a preview site so we could familiarize our current customers with all the upcoming changes.   It seems that the planning helped, the transition went smoothly, and we had no significant problems on the transition to the live servers.

While not very much has changed with FTP in the last forty-years, a lot of effort is going into PixtaSynapse to make it simply the best way to transfer large-graphic files.

We’ve been busy the last few months updating PixtaSynapse and we’re getting ready to release a beta snapshot to our existing customers so they can get a feel for it, offer feedback, and we can begin the migration to the new release.

In this release, we’ve really focused on making transferring files easy.

1. We’ve redesigned the Inbox and added an additional thumbnail specific view. In both list and thumbnail views we’ve added the ability to drag and drop thumbnails to send files and recycle them.
2. We’ve updated our PDF renderer so it can process just about any complex PDF you can throw at it now.
3. Lots of design changes about how users are added and modified; taking what we learned from PixtaFlow and giving the user-management capabilities of PixtaSynapse the same ease-of-use.
4. We’ve woven virus-checking fluidly into our file pipeline so that checking for viruses is now faster. Since we’re being helpful…we’re also displaying the 10 most active viruses in your Inbox updated automatically.
5. We’ve changed our thumbnail renderer so it renders thumbnails even faster now.
6. Speaking of thumbnails, when you upload a giant file our renderer it will diligently process files up to 500Meg Pixels. And…when the render is completed it will automagically update the placeholder image in your Inbox.
7. Tool-tips/hovering: Are now enabled so when you hover the cursor briefly over a thumbnail, you’ll see details about that image: file type, file size, date uploaded, date downloaded, who sent you the file, etc. If the file is being worked on by some task in the file pipeline, you’ll see the current state of it in the tool-tip.
8. Right-clicking on a thumbnail generates a pop-up which you can choose an appropriate action: {Download, Send, Recycle and File Properties}.
9. Underneath the hood, our infrastructure is being revamped to accommodate more customers gracefully while still maintaining the great quality of service we’re known for. We’ll be working on this as needed to continue to make PixtaSynapse the easiest way to transfer files on the planet.
10. We’ve added a bunch more bandwidth and storage behind the scenes and will continue to do so as the service continues to grow.
11. Almost forgot to mention: while we’ve added lots of great features, more bandwidth and storage for all existing customer accounts – we’re doing so at no additional cost.

Your comments are really important to us so please let us know how we’re doing. Either leave a comment here, send email, or give us a call.

Yikes! I just tried out a “Free” file transfer service and found that the transfer time took close to 30-40x longer than it would have with PixtaSynapse.  To cut to the chase, even after the transfer had finally completed my overall experience was pretty poor.

PixtaSynapse is a business oriented file transfer service.  We’re not trying to build our business by getting millions of free users and making up our costs through advertising.  We are a small company whose mission is to offer a great product/service for folks that want an easy, reliable and secure way to transfer files.  From generating thumbnails for most every graphic image type, nightly off-site backups, a secure infrastructure and looking for the latest viruses in a transferred file we want to get your file to its destination as quickly and securely as possible.   To do this we’ve purchased, customized and configured our own systems to make transferring a file easy and secure as possible without over subscribing our customer base.  We don’t outsource file transfer to another cloud provider we’ve invested in our own technology we’ve been refining since 2004.

We grow our business one customer at a time.   For students and folks that need to occasionally transfer large files we have a free-plan, with minimal features, so you can move files too.  But the free traffic doesn’t interfere with the paid traffic, period.  If there is bandwidth available the free traffic is welcome to it but has soon as paying customers need to transfer files the available free bandwidth gets absorbed, reducing the amount of available free bandwidth and increasing the speed of the paid traffic.

Providing a high quality service to our customers is important to us.  It’s difficult to tell from the landing page of a website, or FTP site, how each ranks.  Often the choice is made based on the look of the web page design.  We know we’ve been there.  There are quite a few complex technologies at work behind the scenes at Pixta but the real story is that we’ve been helping customers transfer millions of files since 2004.  Give us a call or email us to find out how we can assist in to making your brand shine when transferring files.

My daughter’s elementary school has grades from kindergarten to 5th grade. Yesterday I picked my daughter up from school. While there I overheard a group of boys talking to one another about networks, and access points. They had me at network.

I moved a bit closer to eavesdrop: One boy said to the others, “you need to have the access point setup in a common area, our is a G type and we keep it in our living room.” He was waving his hands at one of the boys has he talked almost yelling with excitement, “The signal goes through the walls and it gets weaker you need to be as close as possible.” Another boy rattled off, “sometimes I get a great wireless signal from one of my neighbors house that not encrypted it’s pretty fast.” They started walking away, sheese.

These kids were smart and having fun playing with technology. They’re growing up in a world surrounded by mobile phones, networks and instant information. They don’t fear it, rather they embrace especially if it’s easy to use and serves their purpose of having fun; it’s impressive.

Even us kids that have left 5th grade far in our wake want technology to be easy to use. At Pixta we work hard to ease the complex technical details of:  securely transferring a file, workflow and web-based purchasing.

You don’t need to know the details of an engine to drive a car, nor should you need to know about complexities of FTP, different OS’s, security protocols, virus protection etc.

Our job is to make technology easy to use so you can get your business done as efficiently as possible.

As the holidays quickly approach we wanted to end the year by thanking each of our valued customers with a gift (See below).  
This year has been really busy for Pixta, Inc.  We’ve added a great new feature to PixtaFlow that can dynamically build Adobe PDF files based on form input.  It’s really useful for making custom cards, menus in which the prices vary, etc.

We’ve also added several new features to PixtaSynapse; there are some core infrastructure changes you won’t see but which will make using PixtaSynapse better and other changes you definitely will see. These changes include:  a site redesign to make transferring files even easier, faster and more convenient for you and your customers.  You’ll see this rolling out late December – early 2011.
There are lots of technical details about what’s happening around Pixta and general service improvements on our nifty new blog.  And…we’ve set up both a Pixta Facebook page and Twitter feed so that we can stay more closely in touch with our customers.  With our email ticket system, toll-free phone, Blog, Facebook and Twitter feed there’s lots of ways to reach us.  So there’s no excuse, just let us know if there’s something you’d like to see improved in any of our services.

About the gift:

The crew here at Pixta often needs to send movies and pictures to friends and family during the holidays.  We think transfer limits inhibit us from sending all the pictures or movies we would like, so, in the holiday spirt: we’ve taken transfer limits off of all pre-existing paying accounts for the month of December, 2010, as our “Thank You” for your business during the year.

What this means is that you can transfer as much data as you like during the month of December… on us.

Please be sure to manage your storage limits as those are still applicable.  Helpful hint:  If you have briefly exceeded your storage limit don’t worry, we only charge based on the 95%tile — which means storage for your account is averaged over the entire billing period.  This is good for our customers since peak highs are averaged out and we only charge for overages when your limit has been exceeded over the billing period.   Get files into the Recycle Bin where charges don’t apply.

Thank you for being a Pixta customer we hope you have a very Happy Holiday Season!
All the best,

The entire team at Pixta, Inc.

Several great changes coming for PixtaSynapse. We’re starting from the ground-up revising the features that most users are using on a regular basis to make the service faster, easier-to-use and look better.

These changes will be rolling out to a limited beta group in mid-November and all users in December.