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Forum Discussion
The Photos page is changing...
I've just seen the banner that says "The Photos page is changing on 30 June 2017 but your pictures will stay safe in your Dropbox account. Learn more". The gist is that they are removing the final re...
Hi everyone,
Thanks again for your continued feedback on our upcoming changes.
I wanted to let you know that we've heard your concerns about how difficult it is to preserve your album structures in Dropbox. Our engineers have created a simple album export tool to help make this process easier. It's available starting today at the following URL:
www.dropbox.com/photos/album_download
The tool will allow you to download your albums to your desktop as .zip files. Please note that you'll be downloading a new copy of your photos, not moving them, so the photos will still exist in your Dropbox in the original location you saved them.We hope this tool will help alleviate some of the frustration that some of you have reported in this thread. If you have any problems using the tool, feel free to contact us via www.dropbox.com/support.
Regards,
Richard
I have spent ALOT of time creating and organizing Dropbox photo albums over the years. The "value added" that they provide is that a single photo file can be included in multiple albums, albums based on different themes, events, etc that all relate to that single photo. I have also spent ALOT of time, working with thousands of photos to set the "Date Taken" file attribute, which is the default (and only) sort order available in Dropbox albums.
The recent Dropbox announcement about "changes" to the Photos page appears to take this all away, with no honest explanation offered, and no substitute functionality evident.
It is incredible to me that functionality would be removed from a product in this way. The claim that Dropbox is "focused on building better ways for you to work with all file types" would be laughable if it weren't so distressing.
Is "Date Taken" (and I'm not talking about "Date Modified" here) going to be offered as a sort option in the File list displays that we are left with?
The announcement states that "Dropbox won’t be able to automatically convert existing albums into folders", and instead I should create new file folders to match my albums and "Select the photos you’d like to move by clicking the checkboxes to the left of the file names". Do you really expect me to do this for thousands and thousands of file names?
It's seeming to me that my time might be better invested elsewhere.
Exactly. They need to address these concerns right away.
The new Photos may be better by I do not understand why existing albums can't be turned into folders automartically (at least as an option) as part of the update so people keep their pictures sorted somewhat like they are used to. I have tons of albums and will have to spend hours on creating folders to re-create the way I have my photos organized. It's like Dropbox pushes a large part of the burden of a extensive update over on their (paying) users. This may give me the Google Photo's itch again. I so want to stay with Dropbox, but this turn may be one too much. I hope not though.
And there's no mention of mobile, in my case Android. Will this affect how photos are synced, accessed and organized on my phone? I would really like to see the option to choose synced folders on the phone like Google Photos has. I would also like to get rid of the "Camera Uploads" folder concept used today. Maybe this will change also after June 30?
For me Dropbox is a finely tuned tool I use to move seamlessly between computer, phone and web access to files and photos in which sync and share is a very important aspect. I am so afraid this will mess it all up for me. I already know it will create a lot of work! It may be a long hot summer! :)
//C
The page https://www.dropbox.com/help/photos-videos/changes-photos?oref=e says
"As we learn more about how our users prefer to work with photos, we’ll launch improvements to the experience."
I think it's pretty clear that many users "prefer to work with photos" by keeping the albums that they spent so long creating ...
So Dropbox's Help Page now explains what the "speed scroller" is. It's the scroll bar on the right side of the Photo Page that enables you to zip back through time to a particular date, and dispays the date as you scroll. This will no longer be available.
It's always a mystery when a company rolls out a new version that is less robust than the last. The speed scroller is an incredibly useful tool, not just for photos, but one could use it for any type of file.
The fact that such useful functionality, already built, is being deleted, together with the double-speak Dropbox is using in announcing and discussing this change, reinforces my suspicion that there is a licensing/patent issue lurking behind this change. They're acting a lot like Nancy Pelosi, "You'll just have to wait to see what's changed." Ominous.
i've decided to prepre for a Google transistion for data and photos making it as painless as possible if I find the Dropbox change(s) to be unacceptable. With a service like this which I use every days on muliple devices even small changes matter a lot. I dumped Google Photos because I was not able to get my pictures to show up in a folder in Drive. Not many people seemed to care about that, but for me, and the way I work, that was a must. So a drastic change like this in Dropbox really freak me out since there a multiple ways it can go wrong for me. And that is also why some sort of beta test or demo would make it much easier for me, and others for whom this is a big deal.
I am testing Flickr. They have a good uploader"Flickr Uploader" which will upload in existing folders. It does a duplicate check so you can avoid uploading duplicates which is really useful. Their sorting/findinig function "organize" for setting up new albums (without recopying the photos.) is much quicker and faster than the current dropbox service. You can also email photos to Flickr which can be useful. Have not yet had a chance to test the sharing and collaborative functions, but very mpressed so far. Has anyone else had experience of FlicKr?
I wondered if anyone has a link to refund my money. Photos is now counterintuitive.
