Content Creation Is Booming
The average number of Internet-connected devices each person has is rapidly growing. Tablets, smartphones, and even PCs are becoming more affordable, lightweight, and versatile. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to find multiple desktop computers, a few laptops, and a slew of smart mobile devices in each household.
With more devices comes more file creation. It’s never been easier to create your own content and/or download media from the Internet. While the availability of file consumption and creation is certainly a boon for the digital community, it comes with significant drawbacks.
Device & Content Fragmentation
One major snag involving the rampant increase in file creation is something called device and content fragmentation. Just because your devices can connect to the Internet, doesn’t mean that the files stored on their respective hard drives are connected. Thus, your files are fragmented and spread out amongst your equally disunited devices.
Past solutions to this predicament typically involved cloud storage services or external hard drives. And these half-baked fixes stir up their own unfortunate set of issues. Most notably, they have storage limitations, inconvenient uploading processes, and dismal interfaces for browsing and streaming your content. These solutions also fail to merge or integrate your various media libraries, such as iTunes, Apple Photos, or Adobe Lightroom.
So the question becomes, “how can I seamlessly connect the files and media libraries on my multiple computers and other mobile devices?”
Connecting Your Hard Drives Using Younity
Younity is a media server app that unifies the content across your devices within a single interface. Their new desktop client allows you to create computer-to-computer connections with practically no setup or configuration. Their mobile app then enables users to have remote connections to any computer hard drive that has younity installed on it.
To use younity, simply go to their website and create an account. You can use a Facebook or Gmail account to automatically sign up, or create an entirely new account with any email address. Once you’ve logged in, click the download button and wait to complete installation. The younity desktop app is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems. The mobile app works on iOS and Android devices.
After downloading and completing the installation, younity will automatically start to scan your hard drive. The length and speed of the scan is determined by the amount and size of your files. While you wait for younity to scan your first computer, you can install the app on your other computers and mobile devices. Make sure to use the same account credentials to login on each device.
Automatic Content Organization
Once you’ve installed the app on all of your devices, you can begin enjoying the fruits of younity’s labor. The app organizes all of your content into categories of “Videos”, “Photos”, “Music”, and “All Files”. It further separates each type of content into subcategories. In “Videos”, you’ll see sections for “Home Videos”, “TV Shows”, “GoPro”, “Movies”, and “All”. In “Photos”, you’ll see “Apple Photos”, “GoPro”, “Adobe Lightroom”, and “All”. In “Music”, you can view your audio files by “Artists”, “Genres”, “Albums”, “Songs”, or “Playlist”. Or, if you prefer a more generalized view, you can navigate to the “All Files” icon that presents every folder and file located on your multiple hard drives.
The younity desktop app continuously and automatically scans your computer. This way, any changes or additions to your files are instantly recognized and served to your other devices. With its automatic scanning, younity successfully solves the cloud storage problem of inconvenient uploads and their obstruction of spontaneous file accessing. It enables you to access and enjoy your media libraries (iTunes, Apple Photos, Adobe Lightroom) all within a single interface, and you can easily merge libraries from multiple computers.
Easiest and Most Enjoyable Computer-To-Computer Connection
Browsing and enjoying your media within younity is similar to perusing Netflix or Spotify. The desktop app presents your files in a visually enticing and user-friendly fashion. Even if you use it on a single device, it helps organize a cluttered hard drive and helps you discover your own content in an exciting and refreshing way.
The one caveat with younity is that your computers must be turned on and connected to WiFi. As long as they are, younity will tidily wed your multiple hard drives and the content that lives on them. And, you can always still use younity as a standalone file browser and media manager for a single computer. Although, the real benefit of younity comes with the easy unification of multiple computer hard drives. There is no limit to how many computers or mobile devices can be united with younity.
Click here to learn more about younity.