The Cloud Is Coming, The Cloud Is Coming. It won’t be long and you’ll think of the cloud as that place where everything you do on your Mac gets saved. Or, not.
The cloud is public and/or private storage somewhere out there on the interwebs. If you still use a scanner for documents and images, here’s an app that scans and saves direct to the cloud.
Save My Scan, Mr. Cloud
GMail and Apple’s MobileMe email are cloud-based. All the email is stored on someone else’s servers someplace else besides your Mac. The same goes for backups. We can store them on the cloud.
Cloud-based scan storage is the next frontline to assault our traditional senses.
ScanDrop marries a couple of our worlds. Scanning and saving documents. And dropping, or storing, those same documents in the cloud.
To be fair, the makers of ScanDrop have an ulterior motive for developing an app that lets your Mac scan documents and images and save them, store them, directly to an online, internet-based storage server.
ScanDrop is made by OfficeDrop, which is an online digital filing system. You get online storage, they get money from you every month.
The Way It Works
The idea here is that you have a gazillion documents or images (or, heaven forbid, both) that need to be scanned and archived or stored somewhere online where everyone in your organization can get to the files.
OfficeDrop does all that a number of ways. One is to send them you documents and they’ll scan and store for you. Another way is to upload your files—.jpgs, documents, PDFs, .pngs—and they’ll scan them and store them.
Or, by using ScanDrop on your Mac, scan whatever documents or images you need and each one is automagically uploaded and stored within your account at OfficeDrop.
I know. It’s kind of a new age way to handle a gazillion documents or images and get them stored or archived off premise and to the cloud. All for a price.
Speaking of price, OfficeDrop taps you for a few dollars each month to store your documents online, but also charges you to do it all for you. And, they also charge you $10 (minus a penny) for the privilege of using their ScanDrop app to scan and upload your documents and images.
The whole idea of scanning your stuff and storing it somewhere else isn’t bad. It’s the future. It means an extra expense, but you don’t have to worry about local storage management. Simply send your stuff to the cloud.
Files can also be scanned and uploaded to Google Docs, Evernote, even the popular Dropbox, bypassing the OfficeDrop service and fees (for those Mac folks who like to roll their own document management system). Or, store it all on your Mac.
The ScanDop app should work with most popular scanners from most major scanner makers. Should? Caveat emptor, amigo. The $9.95 app is only available from the Mac App Store. No free trial period. The Windows version of ScanDrop can be had for free. Go figure.
To confuse things just a little more, the ScanDrop app doesn’t come with OCR (optical character recognition) for documents (one of the reasons to scan in the first place), preferring instead to use the OCR function within Evernote Premium, or Google Docs, or OfficeDrop’s extra cost service.
This type of scanning and storage service is becoming more popular but also comes with a price.
