SocialFolders keeps track of your cloud data

At a Glance

SocialFolders

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

With the rise of cloud services that store our media away from our computers, it’s easy to lose track of that picture you uploaded to Facebook, or that one important note you wrote for yourself in Google Docs five months ago.

SocialFolders is designed to bring your cloud data back onto your computer. To do so, link your social accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Google Docs, and Twitter, to name a few) with the SocialFolders website, and then download the SocialFolders app, which syncs all of your media to a set of folders on your Mac. With many services, you’re able to both upload and download media just by dragging and dropping files into the relevant folder.

For basic tasks, SocialFolders works like a charm. I was able to take a set of photos, place them into a folder, drag that folder into my Facebook folder, and in a few minutes, a new album had showed up on my Facebook page with all of the images I wanted inside of it. When someone edited a Google Doc that I shared with them, SocialFolders brought the change onto my computer as well.

There are a few things about the way SocialFolders is set up that I find frustrating. As a major user of Evernote, I was thrilled to see Evernote synchronization on the list of services SocialFolders supports. Unfortunately, it doesn’t currently support syncing notes, just the media attached to your notebooks.

Also frustrating is its lack of support for multi-image tweets. When I posted several pictures of what I was making for dinner in a single tweet, SocialFolders was only able to pull down one of the three images I posted. The same went for other tweets with multiple images attached that I had posted in the past.

If there were one word to describe SocialFolders, it would be competent. The service certainly doesn’t bowl me over, but it does a decent job delivering what it promised. Social Folders is free for up to three accounts and 2000 files, and has a $10 per year subscription fee for unlimited access.

[Blair Hanley Frank is a freelance writer based in Walla Walla, Washington.]

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