Files and Collections
Files
The Files tab shows your files, a folder at a time, on every device in your network. Add files adds them from this device; its menu (the arrow beside it) adds a folder with everything in it, or makes a new folder. On a computer, you can also drag files and folders onto Files to add them to the folder shown. Hold Shift as you drop them to take them in instead: the originals are deleted once they’re safe on your other devices.
A file’s menu renames, moves, shares or deletes it. Deleted files go to the trash (the bin in the top bar), and can be restored from there. Every change keeps the version before it, so an earlier version can be restored too.
Photos and videos show as thumbnails. Change view, in the top bar, shows a folder another way: as a List, a Gallery of its photos and videos, its Timeline, or Cards, one for each folder and file, with its menu in the card’s corner. What you choose is kept for that folder on all your devices.
A photo the wrong way up can be turned: Rotate…, in its menu, turns it a quarter at a time, and Save keeps it so, as a new version. The picture itself isn’t changed, only the note in it that says which way up it goes, so nothing of it is lost.
Collections
Every folder belongs to a Collection. Most folders are just part of your files, but a folder can be made a Collection of its own, with its own settings: how carefully it’s kept, who it’s shared with, and where it shows. The Collections tab lists them, and New Collection makes one.
Import a folder, in the menu beside New Collection, keeps a folder on this device in Iceblock, adding what’s put in it. On an Android phone you choose the folder in Android’s own picker, which lets Iceblock keep reading it: a phone’s camera folder (DCIM), say, or Pictures. Android’s picker doesn’t offer the whole of the phone’s storage, or the Download folder itself, though a folder inside Download it does. The folder is looked at whenever Iceblock syncs, in the background too.
You choose how:
- Mirror keeps a copy that follows the folder, in a Collection of its own, read-only in Iceblock. A file deleted there is deleted here too, unless you choose Keep files deleted there, from the Collection’s Source, in Collections.
- Consume moves the files into Iceblock, deleting each from the folder once it’s safely on your other devices. It can go into a new Collection, or a folder of one you have, keeping the folder’s own folders. A file whose name is taken there is kept beside it, as
IMG_0001 (2).jpg, say. Once it’s done, the folder goes too. - Keep taking new files as they arrive makes a Consume carry on until you stop it: a phone’s camera folder, emptied into your photos as you take them. The folder itself stays.
If the folder can’t be reached (the drive’s unplugged, or it was moved), Iceblock pauses it and tells you: nothing in Iceblock is deleted because of it.
The Timeline
A Collection of photos opens as a Timeline: newest first, by day, with who added each. Pull down, or tap the sync button, to get what’s new from your other devices. Touch and hold a photo to react to it with an emoji (with a mouse, the button at its bottom right): everyone it’s shared with sees it. The same emoji again takes it back.
Comments
Open a photo or file to see its comments, and to add one. Everyone the file is shared with sees them. Pull it down, or on a computer tap the sync button, to get new comments for that file alone.
Touch and hold a comment (or right-click it) to copy it. Your own comments can be edited or deleted there too. Nobody can edit anyone else’s, and the file’s owner can delete any comment on it.
When someone you share with comments, or adds a file to a Collection you share, Iceblock tells you. On Android you can answer a comment straight from its notification. Tell of comments and new files, in a Collection’s menu, turns this off for that Collection.