In just two clicks, users are able to seamlessly create personal sharing points, upload content via web, e-mail, MMS, Facebook, Firefox extension, phone and fax inputs and share it on-the-fly through drop.io’s various outputs like web, e-mail, MMS, Twitter, iTunes, fax and more.

So to get started, just head over to http://drop.io. The site will generate a string of unique characters for your drop’s address, or you can enter a custom name if you’d prefer. Then simply select the specific files or folders you’d like to upload from your computer, and click “Create a drop”. Easy Peasy.

Back over to MailChimp. When you’re editing your campaign’s content and are ready to add images or link to files (in step 3 of the campaign builder), click on the little gallery icon in the editor’s toolbar. At the top of the screen, click the little “drop.io files” button.

This will bring up the following dialogue:

Simply fill in your drop’s credentials and click “load drop files”. This will open a new dialogue window displaying the contents of your drop, complete with the file name and file size. Select the asset you’d like to add and click import.

This will place the image or file in your gallery, and you can then insert it into your campaign just as you normally would.

One caveat that’s important to note: If you’re importing a non-image file type from drop.io (PDF, mp3, video, etc.), there’s a slightly different workflow. In step 3 of the campaign builder, you’ll need to access your gallery by clicking the “add link” icon inside the editor.

This will bring up a little window where you’ll need to click the large “browse media” button, and that takes you to the gallery view that allows you to see both your Files and Images folders. Any non-image assets will be uploaded and stored in the Files folder.

Flickr

In the MailChimp V5 release, we’ve made it super easy to link your Flickr photos to your MailChimp account, pull them into your image gallery, and use ‘em in your email campaigns.

When you’re editing your campaign’s content and are ready to add images, click on the little gallery icon in the editor’s toolbar.

The gallery will open in a pop-up window and you’ll see a Flickr Images button at the top. Click it! (Go on, you know you want to)

The next window that pops up will ask you to authorize MailChimp to access your Flickr account. If you’re not logged into Flickr, you’ll be asked to do that before you’re taken to the authorization page.

When you upload your photos to Flickr, you have the option to tag them with keywords that will help you find them later. Since I knew I was searching for photos from our holiday party, and that I had tagged those photos accordingly in Flickr, searching for “holiday” brought up exactly what I was looking for. If you don’t tag your photos or can’t remember what terms you might have used, you can also simply click the “view all photos” button to bring up your most recent (max of 100) photos.

Then simply click the import link to pull an image into your MailChimp photo gallery. (Since our Flickr integration is in its first iteration you’ll have to pull the images into your gallery one at a time.)

Once you’ve imported all the photos you want to use in your email, click on settings at the top of the gallery window to get some additional information about your images. You can sort them by list view (the same way you might see them displayed in a directory on your computer) or a grid of thumbnails. In addition, you can display the file name, the date and time the image was imported into the gallery, and the file size. These refinements are all designed to make using the image gallery a more elegant experience and we welcome your feedback about them.

When you’re ready to add images to your campaign, you’ll now have your Flickr photos at your fingertips. Just be sure to remember to scale them down to dimensions that will fit your template.

See also:

• Image Gallery and iStockPhoto Integration