A stringer filing from the field, a freelance photographer on a breaking story, a wire service pushing footage to a dozen member outlets at once none of it goes through a normal attach-and-send workflow. The files are too large, the connection is often bad, the timing is sometimes legally sensitive, and the footage has to arrive exactly as shot, not recompressed into something a broadcast editor can't use.
Why a messy email thread doesn't work here
Camera-original video and unretouched RAW photos run well past what email attachments allow, and a slow or unreliable field connection makes a failed upload a genuine deadline risk, not just an inconvenience. A transfer that has to restart from zero after a dropped connection is the difference between filing on time and missing the window.
The embargo problem
Press materials are often sent out ahead of a publication or broadcast window, with recipients expected to hold them until a set time. Handling this with a standard file link means the file technically exists the moment it's uploaded so the practical workaround is sending the link immediately but holding back the password until the embargo lifts, rather than resending the whole file at the last minute. It's not a scheduling feature, but it does the job: no one can open the file without the password, and you control exactly when that goes out.
Camera-original footage can't be recompressed
A lot of consumer-facing sharing tools quietly recompress large video or image files to save space. For broadcast or wire use, that's not acceptable the file that arrives has to be bit-identical to what was shot, because any quality loss gets baked into everything downstream. Whatever tool is used for this has to preserve full resolution with nothing stripped out or re-encoded on the way.
One upload, multiple outlets
Wire services and freelancers routinely need to get the same raw footage to several newsrooms at once, not just one. A single link that can be shared to multiple recipients, instead of a separate upload per outlet, saves exactly the kind of time that matters when everyone's working against the same deadline.
What to look for
- No forced recompression — footage and photos arrive exactly as captured.
- Password protection as a practical embargo mechanism, separate from the link itself.
- No account required on the receiving end, so a freelance stringer can send files without the newsroom's IT setting anything up first.
- Reliable uploads on bad connections, since field filing rarely happens over a stable line.
- One link, multiple destinations, for syndication across several outlets.
On Letshareit, footage and photos upload and download at full resolution with no forced recompression, and a link can go out to a newsroom, a stringer, or a wire partner with no account required on either end. Password protection is available on every plan, including guest uploads useful as a practical hold-until-ready mechanism for embargoed material. Free uploads cover files up to 6 GB with no sign-up, and Pro goes up to 500 GB per file for a full day's camera-original footage in one package.
