To kick off the series of S3 Explorer’s Review I will start first with the Official Amazon Console Application. As it is an application by Amazon I had a very high expectation out of it but it did not live up to my expectation. So let us first take the not so good things about the AWS Management Console Application.
Negatives
- The application takes lot of time to start and is very slow to respond on many commands especially right click.
- I get many errors like the following.
- It does not support RRS (Reduced Redundancy Storage which is 33% cheaper than S3 storage) at the front end and if you want to store your files using RRS you have to manually enter the header value each time you upload your files. AWS team is working on it and this feature is expected some time soon.
- It does not support automate time-consuming tasks. What I would prefer is to have some default header settings for each file uploaded under some folders or buckets so that I do not need to add them manually each time I upload. As an example when uploading images to S3 I prefer to add the Cache-Control header to files and I have to do this each time I upload a file and I cannot automate this settings on a bucket level.
- As it is browser based application you can only select files using the file select window and not a complete folder. If you want to upload complete folders you have to manually create each folder and then upload each file.
Positives
- It is browser based application and so you can use it from anywhere and you do not need any setup files to be downloaded and installed on your PC. All you need is your AWS username and password to start uploading things. You don’t need AWS’ Secret key even to use the console window.
- It is totally free and there is no extra cost for using it.
- It is well integrated with Cloudfront and other AWS products.
Over to you
If you have more to share, post in comments below and I will be more than happy to update the list above.
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I do lot of experimentation on new ways to internet marketing strategies for my web properties and like to share my experiences on ways to make money online @ IMTips.co. Read more about me 
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Currently Console doesn't support uploading of large files. At this time (July 2010) the maximal file size is 300 Mb. For a larger files you can use S3 Browser. It's freeware.