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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 suspected this was in the offing when Dropbox sent out a questionnaire that was heavily focused on photos. I called Dropbox out in my responses, but apparently it is marching along.
As an IP lawyer who has seen a lot, I have 3 working theories as to what may be behind this move:
- Poor Business Judgment: Believing it failed to win over consumers with Carousel, Dropbox dropped it, and is convinced it must minimize photo services to be perceived as a "serious" business app. That, of course, is a false dilemma. There is little or no overhead cost in being both, and no value in driving its customers who like the photo service away.
- It’s a Contract Issue: Carousel appears to have been licensed, or there was no reason to drop it. It may be that there was a noncompetition clause that requires Dropbox to get out of the photo-specific business after a certain time.
- It’s a Patent Issue. The move to “we’ll just put your photos in a folder” has the smell of a patent holder threatening to sue over online photo storage, or perhaps photo album-sharing. I don’t know if that’s the case, but Dropbox’s approach could be a work-around, since obviously putting photos in folders is prior art.
Whatever is going on, Dropbox’s attempt at coy messaging on this demonstrates it is either inept at marketing or just doesn’t care. However, working oneself into a lather over changes one hasn’t seen yet is counterproductive. I’m willing to give Dropbox a chance to roll out a useful product: one that maintains automatic file uploads and viewing, and posting to outside services, since I use Dropbox for many other things. The UE is a bit ancient, but it has the virtue of being simple. If Dropbox fails to satisfy, the market will provide – it’s not the only cloud in the sky.
- I believe that's an excellent theory. Your point that the wording is coy supports your claim that there are some legal issues at the foundation of the change. I would imagine that they are still in the process of trying to figure out a more practical solution to making the conversion, but until they figure out how to do it the current announcement is a stopgap measure.
This thread has been marked by DROPBOX as SOLVED!
I have tried to use Google Photos and Drive. There's one problem that brought me back to Dropbox. There's an option to have your Google Photos pictures show up in a folder in Google Drive. They don't by default. I need that to be the case. However, that feature simply does not work. I spent a lot of time in the Google Photos/Drive forums and even on the phone with Google, but it still doesn't work. There's an endless thread regarding this on the Google forums. I went back to Dropbox because of that and now Dropbox is about to create their own mess. Where to next?
I would also consider continuing to use Dropbox for photo storage if the camera uploads option remains. In some ways the folder organization is simpler and cleaner, too, in many ways. I never was relying on Dropbox for anything sophisticated at all, nor did I expect it. However, what they have done at this point is make it very difficult (nearly impossible) for me to migrate my albums to folders, as they suggest. I have way too many files in different places and no way to retrieve the groupings that I can see. The download limit of 1GB means I would have to break downloads into chunks from the photos page, which would be painstaking and time-consuming, as well as requiring me to download and re-upload a huge amount of data simply to maintain the organization of the files. I don't understand why it would be so darn difficult to at least provide a way to copy an album into a folder in one shot. If Dropbox would provide that simple functionality on the photos page until 6/30, I could then step through my albums one by one and save them to a folder. It would be really nice if the folder name were set automatically to the album name, but just any functionality at all that could ease a migration to a folder organization would be enormously helpful.
- Rich
Super User II
bwraith wrote:
I would also consider continuing to use Dropbox for photo storage if the camera uploads option remains.
The Camera Uploads feature is not, and never was, going away. Nothing relating to that feature is changing.
I'm glad to hear the upload feature is not going away. I am, however, still apalled that Dropbox has provided no efficient way to migrate existing albums in the photos view to folders. I just can't understand why something that must be very easy for them to implement, i.e. providing an option to copy selected photos in the photos view to a folder on Dropbox, has not been done. In my case, that would change the migration effort from dozens of hours (I estimated 40 to 80 hours to re-create my albums into folders with the current functionality) to perhaps just a few hours of going through and "selecting all" for each album and copying each album's files to a folder, all right there on Dropbox. It's too darn easy to do that, and I am just shocked they haven't done it. For me, it's the difference between totally lame and reasonable, given they want to eliminate the photo page functionality.
- Thanks for this piece of rationality.
Just finished transfering all data over to onedrive. Not ideal, but their pictures functionality has the timeline, albums and sharing options I am looking for. Work pays for Office365, so the storage is free. I didn't mind paying Dropbox since we have integrated into our lives on many levels. Taking away the photo/albums/sharing/timelines functionality means there is little justification to keep paying them.
