Manage & Share Your Media Files With One Terabyte Of Free Oosah

Oosah is a Web 2.0 content hosting service for digital media files, such as photos, videos, music and general audio files. Currently, Oosah offers one Terabyte of storage space. The platform is very intuitive to use, but also offers interesting features for advanced users. Since it is web-based, it should work with any operating system.

Although not covered in this post, Oosah has versions available for the iPhone and Google’s android mobile phone operating system. With this software you’ll be able to access your media files remotely, for example to stream up to 1TB of MP3’s to your iPhone. Sadly, no option is available for Windows Mobile, yet. Anyone?

Now let’s have a look at the details, shall we?

Below is a snapshot of the media platform. It basically resembles the file explorer most of you will know from Windows.  Thankfully, it also works a lot like it, meaning many of the typical shortcuts will work. If a file went into the wrong folder, you can simply drag & drop it into another or mark several files by holding down the [Ctrl] key or batch select by clicking the [Shift] key. Right-click does not work. Using the respective buttons you can create, rename and delete folders, and more about editing single files will follow further down. Let’s do some uploads first.

As mentioned previously, Oosah only permits media files. There is a detailed list of supported file formats here.

Uploading is straight forward. Hit the green Upload button in the top left, choose your files and go. Unfortunately, you cannot upload an entire folder, but you can select a great number of files at once, which will be uploaded one after the other. I tried it with over 400 files from different folders which worked just fine.

Apparently, video and RAW files require some additional post-uploading processing until they are ready to be displayed. You should receive an eMail from Oosah once they are available. This may take some time…hours, days? Nothing had come in when this post was submitted.

When you scroll over a file you’ll see a small green box with a white arrow, as seen on the top left image in the screenshot below. When you click the arrow, a menu appears as shown on the right. The printing option is very well done, although it doesn’t seem to work in Macs, yet.

While you upload files you can decide whether or not you want them to be public. Later you can go back and look at some more share options through the individual file menu. You can change the share status of a file and even set a password for it. Additionally, you can copy the direct link and the HTML code or eMail the file to your friends.

Unfortunately, only individual files can be shared or edited this way. Also, Oosah appears to have difficulties recognizing international keyboards, as the @ sign wasn’t recognized, however, copy & paste worked fine. What can be done though, is select all files and delete them all or filter for certain file types, including photos, sounds, videos and Oosahs.

Oh wait, what are Oosahs?

Oosahs are personal compositions of media files or let’s say slideshow presentations. You probably noticed the orange Widgets button next to the Upload button. Clicking it will bring up a list of options: Slideshow, Playlist and Gallery, while only a slideshow is referred to as Oosah. By the way, the term playlist is misleading, since only photos, videos and slideshows are permitted, no audio files. You can add a background sound to an Oosah slideshow, though. I will not go into details of how you can create these media compositions. Basically just follow the instructions on screen and you’ll be fine!

Here is an example of an Oosah:

The song you are hearing is called Hilli, from the album Kurr of the Icelandic band amiina. If you enjoy Sigur Rós, you have to check them out and vice versa!

What’s the Connect button for?

You may have spotted the YouTube, Facebook and Picasa logos on the previous images. The folders for the respective services don’t become available until you log into those accounts. That’s what the Connect button is for. You can log in and then view or upload media files through Oosah. Very convenient! Oosah also offers a connect option for Flickr, which opens a pop-up window. Logging in didn’t work for me, the window went blank.

And that’s it. Now you’re all set up to share your media files and there is a lot more to discover on Oosah. Just follow the links from the Oosah Homepage.

I should mention that just recently Tim introduced a similar file storage platform called Hordit. That service provides unlimited amount of space for anything you may want to store, backup or share. However, there are no streaming options for your mobile device. For more information, check out Tim’s article Hordit – A Digital Packrat’s Best Friend. Oh, and meanwhile Hordit has entered public beta, so you won’t need an invitation.