The Photos page is changing...

I probably have more than 30000 photos on Dropbox. I found their barebones photo solution worked very well for my simple photo needs. They provided a way to group photos into albums and had a very easy way to share the photos. Also, their automatic uploading from the phone works well. 

OK, so now I have about 80 albums that were painstakingly assembled over years, sometimes from photos gathered from friends or from unusual photographic devices that did not conform to Dropbox's "creation date", so they are scattered throughout the timeline of my 30000 photos and very hard to track down on the timeline. The "missing date" section itself contains thousands of photos. The only way Dropbox has of finding these again in the album is to individually select every photo in an album and "see in folder", to find out where everything is again. My estimate is that to re-create my albums as folders will take something like 40 hours. Their interface also tends to hide even the filename, which if I could see in a list, might help me quite a bit to track them all down again. However, it seems I have to individually hunt each one down, as things stand.

Meanwhile, downloading and re-uploading, which has been mentioned in some posts, is also close to impractical. For one thing, many of the albums would require downloading more than 1GB, so I would be forced to carefully split the album up into separate downloads and then upload them. Here again, since the file names aren't visible, I would be trying to scroll back in the album view to the last photo previously downloaded, so I could select the next chunk of photos, not knowing if I will exceed the 1GB or not, requiring multiple attempts at downloading, to obtain a chunk less than 1GB. 

What bothers me is that Dropbox must be able to very easily implement a tool that would simply copy photos selected in the photo album view and provide a menu item (in the same place "download" is provided) to copy the selected items to a chosen folder. Obviously, you can download selected files, and they have copy implemented for selected files elsewhere, so how can this be so terribly difficult? Have they really separated the photo album view so completely that it would be impossible to provide a way to copy them to a folder on Dropbox?

Anyway, I suppose that yes, they must have created a situation where they can't offer a migration path back to their own file system.

At this point, all I can do is start rebuilding my albums. I will re-create a folder structure for my 80 albums. This does duplicate the location of the file in the system, but I don't know if perhaps Dropbox's de-duplication software would charge twice for the existence of an identical file in multiple locations. Perhaps not? That would be a very good question for Dropbox to answer, based on the many questions about Dropbox usage brought up regarding usage in their new directory-based method for doing photo albums.

I will be trying out flickr for albums and photos going forward, in answer to some questions from others about alternatives. I believe their albums and collections should provide the needed functionality for organizing. One very useful thing I discovered on flickr is that they provide a way to correct the "creation date", which in the past I couldn't find a good tool online to batch edit creation date (another missing tool in the photo functionality at Dropbox that would have saved me countless hours in the past). I will be trying "multcloud" to move the photos over, which will probably be a nightmare for 30000 plus photos on Dropbox, but I can't see continuing with photos in Dropbox, given how they've handled this situation.

I will definitely think twice about using Dropbox going forward, though it was my default method of storage for many years. I will increase my reliance on Google Drive and Flickr and see how that goes.

If any tools are discovered by others in trying to recover from this loss of photo functionality at Dropbox, I would be very interested.