Would it be great if you had all of your ministry’s (or personal) Instagram pics could be easily accessible on your computer? With Social Folders, you can have your cake and eat it too. (what does that even mean?)

Social Folders (https://socialfolders.me/r/qgmcv) could be a great app for your ministry and/or personal life. Here’s the big idea: it captures all of your files from your social networks and saves them to a folder on your computer. Also, if you add something to that folder, it will upload them to that online service.

In a nutshell:

This service seems like a good value. With everything being up in the “cloud,” it’s nice to take back some of your control.

Looking for more detail? Read on:

Experience

Set up was easy, it took about 2 minutes. Would have been nice if I could have logged in with Facebook or Twitter

I connected Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Connecting these services was simple and straight forward. After a few minutes, my pictures started downloading. A nice window pops up to let you know when they are don downloading.

With Instagram and Twitter, you can also download the pics from anyone you are following. Don’t worry, that’s not creepy or anything.

With Facebook, you can choose which albums you want to download. For uploading, you can decide if you want those files public or private. Also, the CREEP factor is still in effect, you can download your friend’s pictures too.

Here’s the list of the services you can can currently connect to: Box.net, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, Instagram, Photobucket, Picasa, SmugMug, SoundCloud, Twitter, and YouTube.

Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa seem useless, as you would already have a copy of those pictures since you uploaded them to those sites… but, maybe not.

Price

Social Folders is free for your first 2000 files and you can connect up to three services. If you use this link to sign up https://socialfolders.me/r/qgmcv I’ll get an extra 1000 files.

To have unlimited number of files and connections, you can’t either pay $1.99 per month or $9.99 per year.

Negatives

[minor for most] Your initial downloads will eat up your bandwidth…with a broadband connection, I don’t think it’ll be a problem.

[minor] Social Folders, by default, runs in the background, so that takes up memory is always running in the background) takes up memory.

[minor] Social Folders doesn’t accept Paypal, which is my preference for online purchases.

[minor] On the page where you pick new connections, it’s a little difficult to find the button to click that allows you to add a new service for syncing. But maybe I’m just blind.

[could be a deal breaker] If you use this service, at some point, you’ll have to start paying because your pictures and other files online aren’t going to shrink. You’ll always have more instagram pics, not less. So at some point you’ll hit the free file cap and need to pay. I understand that they need to make money, but a free product that can’t always be free isn’t great. Here’s a possible workaround: once a year, log into social folders, pay for one month, download everything from everywhere, and then discontinue your subscription.

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