The Photos page is changing...

Hi Tom,

I had over 80 albums, some with over 1000 photos and videos, spread over many different directories. Also, my timeline in Dropbox Photos (the feature going away), has something like 40000 photos, I think. Many of the photos aren't in the proper place on the timeline, sometimes in "missing dates", which itself has thousands of photos in more or less random order, but also sometimes in actually totally wrong dates. This is because many of my devices don't seem to honor whatever date of creation Dropbox looks at. Or, in some cases, the photos were sent to me from people who did not set the time right on their device. Or, in some cases, I failed to set the time correctly by accident. Anyway, the result is that you are absolutely right, it is very difficult to go find all the individual photos in an album in many cases. 

I thought a simple but bandwidth intensive method would be to download the photos from the album page by selecting all, then downloading them, then uploading them. That can work well, but only if you have less than 1GB of photos and videos in the album. Otherwise, Dropbox will refuse to allow a download greater than 1GB. 

In the end, I had to tailor my strategy to each album, going through and finding some of the bigger videos (using "show in folder" feature in the album page to take me to the video in the dropbox files area) and copying them individually to a new directory. I generally made a copy of the album first, so that I could go through and delete each item from the copied album after copying that item to the new folder where the album is being recreated in Dropbox's file system. I then could probably download and upload most or all the photos in one shot, once the individual large videos had been moved. 

The process was very time-consuming in my case. It took me about 15-20 hours, which is less than I had estimated (perhaps more like 40 hours is what I had guessed), but it did take a good long time.

I am still wondering why Dropbox couldn't at least provide a "copy to Dropbox folder" function in their album area. I believe this would alleviate many of us with a large investment in albums and photo features in Dropbox.

Also, I am not sure about this at all and would much appreciate a Dropbox employee making a definitive statement, but I believe that if you create multiple copies of a file in different directories, as long as you don't modify them in any way, the extra copies may not count against your quota. I believe Dropbox chunks its files into 4MB chunks, and if other files have the same exact chunks, they won't increase your space usage. I don't know if this is true, but I thought I read that somewhere. Anyway, if Dropbox could comment on that, it might alleviate some of the concerns about big data usage increases from having multiple albums with same pictures implemented as folders in Dropbox, which I've read here and there.

Meanwhile, I plan to continue to use Dropbox for storage of my photos. I may even construct albums as folders in many cases going forward. However, I think that the message Dropbox has sent is that we should use photo-specialized sites for things like albums and photo sharing, and use Dropbox only for storage as their focus. I am therefore using flickr for now. I have discovered that multcloud will allow me to transfer via the cloud (and it is quite fast if you use their premium service) from Dropbox to Flickr albums. It is very finnicky, but if you set up your multcloud properly, you can copy (very lightly tested at this point, but did transfer an album with 400 photos and videos successfully as well as a few more small ones, so read with huge grain of salt) an entire folder in Dropbox (containing only photos and videos) into Flickr's album subdirectory on multcloud. This seems to have created an album in Flickr with the same content. This seems promising to me. Flickr should be very good for photo sharing functionality and has a number of useful editing and management tools. One that I really found useful is a batch way of changing the "creation date", which should alleviate some of my worst problems with devices that put wrong dates on photos and videos.

I hope you find this useful. I am done converting my albums in Dropbox to folders after 15-20 hours. From here on out, I'll still keep the photos and videos in Dropbox and often create folders that are essentially "albums" in Dropbox. However, I will most likely immediately transfer the folders or the photos and videos to Flickr to implement any further sharing and organization into additional albums or "collections" or whatever on Flickr. Sigh.

You can either manually go through all your pictures, download them and then upload them again to folders.

Yes, you will have to manually create and organize all your pictures to folders.

My advice is to move to Google Photos. That's my plan. You will be better off with Google Photos as it is a more powerfull comapred to Dropbox. I'm long time Dropbox user and I think I'll have to abandon it after years of usage and move to Google Drive and Google Photos.

I believe Dropbox has faced reality and decided to kill everything that's not Bussines related.

They don't really care about consumer options as that is not their goal or main money maker.

cheers

Of course people can see all of the comments in the other link however to summarise, DROPBOX are "sunsetting" as they put it, in other words getting rid of all clients existing photo albums. They will all be deleted from June 30th.  These albums have taken people weeks and years to compile. Many users have 10000 or more photos all classified into ALBUMS.

From June 30th Dropbox will delete these albums and the current Timeline facility

Users are being given between now and the end of June to download all of the photos (thousands) from their albums, and re upload them where they will have to be uploaded again and saved into folders.

These new folders will use alot more DROPBOX space, because if a single photo is in multiple folders it will of course use alot more space than the previous solution

Effectively the photo section of DROPBOX is being dropped.

Dropbox are not even offering to migrate existing albums into folders but leaving their clients to deal with the ridiculous decision

I urge all people effected to post this onto your own Facebook pages and if you know any journalists or other forums, to make our voice heard.

I have around 10,000 photos. I use the album function to send bespoke photos to clients. Dropbox's "solutions" means that I will have to copy photos each time to a new album. There is no clarity about how we will be able select the photos easily. Crucially it means that certain "key photos" will be copied hundred of times into different bespoke albums. I am currently looking at Flickr - does anyone have any experience with other options?

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.