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Selecting all starred photos

I need to select all of the photo's that we recently starred. The only way I can see them all together is on my homepage but from there you cannot select multiple photo's and there are no checkboxes. Shift or control mouse clicks don't work.

When I go to the folder I know they are in there is no way to sort by "starred" or filter "starred".

A star appears next to those photo's which have been starred when I am in that folder but as soon as I click the checkbox the stars for all other "starred" photo's just disappear.

I have also tried searching for "starred" photo's in the search bar but it doesn't come back with the correct results.

I had my wife go through over 6,000 photo's to figure out which one's she'd like in our holiday calendar and she "starred" over 300 photo's.

Also tried going into the attributes on the local files on my PC hoping that there was some tag that dropbox adds to these files that I could sort by but still nothing.

If I can't figure this out I am a DEAD man LOL! Really not funny 😞

Is there is no way other way to do this other than opening each individual picture from my homepage and downloading them 1 at a time?

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Rich

Starring a file only makes it appear on your home page for quick access. There's no way to select all or filter on all starred files.

All comments

Rich

Starring a file only makes it appear on your home page for quick access. There's no way to select all or filter on all starred files.

ayeshaji

This is not an acceptable solution. Please fix.

calledhandid

seems no fix way

Kalbir

Totally agree - starred is worse than there being no feature to star at all. It gives you the idea that you will be able to collect these photos together but there is nothing you can do with them once you have actually starred them.

So as with the original poster, you spend a load of time starring things, only to learn that it was pointless.

Was there any user research on this "feature"?

Mark

@Kalbir

I'm not sure what the point of the Home page is actually, but, I seriously doubt it will ever include Photo functionality like you are all talking about I'm afraid - as similar things to what you've mentioned have not long since been removed from Dropbox's website.

Sadly as well

@ayeshaji and @calledhandid - there actually isnt anything to fix. Its working as intended. Albeit in a less than helpful way.

IainB

@bobbo1 wrote:
I need to select all of the photo's that we recently starred. The only way I can see them all together is on my homepage but from there you cannot select multiple photo's and there are no checkboxes. Shift or control mouse clicks don't work.
If I can't figure this out I am a DEAD man LOL! Really not funny

Is there is no way other way to do this other than opening each individual picture from my homepage and downloading them 1 at a time?

Just a thought, one your Dropbox home page, can you not just drag and drop each starred image into a new folder? Still a bit laborious, but would get the job done.

Charles M.4

Nope, can't even do that. Starring is essentially useless.

barbapapaki

The only way that worked for me was through Dropbox's Iphone App.

Open the App.

Go to the folder with your files, some of which are already "starred".

Select "List View" [this does not work while on "Grid View"].

Tap on Select (top right).

And then Select from your list - manually, one by one - all the files that have the "star" next to their name.

It's not the most straightforward way and Dropbox can definitely improve this functionality, but if your starred files are not in the thousands and/or if you are patient enough, this solution should work.

martin_z1

I have a similar problem - I've done exactly the same as the original OP only my wife has selected about a thousand.

Can't do them one by one.

So I'm writing a script which will - download the list of names, and then find each one on my home computer and copy them into a new directory. I'll let you know how I get on tomorrow.

But really, I shouldn't need to be a geek to solve this problem.

I totally agree - the "star" is almost useless as it stands.

martin_z1

Hi again

OK - I have managed to do this. It helps that I am using Linux and working on the command line, so this is not going to be useful for everyone - but here's how it goes.

a) Go to the "starred" list and ensure you click on the link to show ALL of them.

b) right-click on the page and download it to a file, called, say, photolist.html

c) now the following commands are what you need:-

This one splits all the html commands onto single lines.

sed "s/>/>\n/" photolist.html > photolist1.html

This one extracts all the file names you need - with the subdirectories they are in.

grep "^<a.*starred" > photolist1.html | sed "s/^.*preview\///" | sed "s/sed "s/\" class=\"sta.*//" > filelist.txt

No guarantees! But it worked for me. Hope this is helpful.

martin_z1

Hi again

I've just had reason to repeat the exercise I did in the previous post, and I've got a couple of typos in the commands.

The two commands should be:-

sed "s/>/>\n/g" photolist.html > photolist1.html

grep "^<a.*starred" photolist1.html | sed "s/^.*preview\///" | sed "s/\" class=\"sta.*//" > filelist.txt

NOTE ALSO - there is a maximum number of starred files that can be displayed on the front page - 1000. As many as you like can be starred, but only a thousand are displayed.

mri

thank you,

wrote:
The only way that worked for me was through Dropbox's Iphone App.

Open the App.

Go to the folder with your files, some of which are already "starred".

Select "List View" [this does not work while on "Grid View"].

Tap on Select (top right).

And then Select from your list - manually, one by one - all the files that have the "star" next to their name.

It's not the most straightforward way and Dropbox can definitely improve this functionality, but if your starred files are not in the thousands and/or if you are patient enough, this solution should work.

that is a solution! It is still a fail from dropbox, but no my star-selection wasnt pointless!

IainB

Thanks for this suggestion, mri. True, Dropbox need to sort this, but it's good to have a work-around.

Appreciate your help.

Cheers

Iain

JBphoto

Agree - I starred photos with the assumption that the collection could than be accessed - this is not functional

Rich

There is nothing for Dropbox to fix here as the feature is working as intended. The purpose of starring a file is to make it appear on your Dropbox Home page for easy access; nothing more.

https://help.dropbox.com/desktop-web/star-doc-file-folder

BobbeeV

This is one of the many reasons its time to find a new app for my photos. Dropbox is not user friendly and my photos and docs are too important to have here.

Roshanak_baghi

I have come to the same solution. The problem is how to transfer my photos back to my phone without losing g the time stamps and therefore then put them in the new app. I have been battling with this for 2 months!

BobbeeV

I downloaded to my Mac then uploaded to Amazon. Long process but worth it

pablopk

I could not agree with the utter lunacy of this restriction. When it comes to file organizing and photo organizing in particular Dropbox is beyond inadaquete. Finding, moving, organizing photos is nigh near impossible to do efficiently. This is especially irksome when it comes to trying to share images. If I want to share a group of photos I have to put them in their own folder, but sorting photos requires looking at them and there is no way to tag photos for sorting or moving to a file efficiently.

In all seriousness Dropbox, if you can't fix this problem this will probably be my last year using your service.

Rich

@pablopk wrote:
When it comes to file organizing and photo organizing in particular Dropbox is beyond inadaquete.

Dropbox's photo mamangement used to be more than adequate, and in fact better than most other services, but they've been going backwards in recent years. We've lost Carousel (a fantastic app to manage photos on a mobile device), Albums, the previous design of the Photos page (hell, the entire website design sucks now!), the basic capabilities to manage the photos in the main location we're viewing them from, etc. Each change is accompanied by a message that they're looking into ways to improve the site, but improvements never come. Dropbox says they'll launch improvements as they learn how we prefer to work with Photos, but the ways we've preferred have all been removed.

Fact is, Dropbox is no longer the best tool for photo management, and they seem to not care about that anymore. They continue to remove features in the name of improvement, but actual improvements never come, and I seriously doubt that they ever will at this point. Photo and video management is just not on their radar anymore.

pablopk

I agree. And I use Dropbox primarily for other purposes myself. I suspect they have decided photo storage is something they want to actively discourage, if their updates and changes are any indicator. Which is fine, I guess. But when my current subscription is set to renew I expect I will pay for cloud storage in another location that both provides for document and file sharing, but also allows for easy photo management and sharing; unless that trend reverses.

JaneCameron

Agree totally. Most annoying thing ever. Just wasted unbelievable amount of time on a project with a v tight deadline. Fuming. Dropbox, this seems like such a basic requirement - to be able to move and manipulate selected photos.

BobbeeV

I’m about done downloading all content from Dropbox because of this. If you have Amazon Prime it’s a MUCH better deal and photos can be moved around.

AreYouKiddingMe

This is laughably bad. One more reason why other cloud companies are eating Dropbox's lunch. This was their race to lose and they're actively working to lose it. I'm picturing some overpaid kid in a hoddie saying, "nah, the users are wrong on this one."

I especially love how our options for @Rich's posts are to upvote or to upvote. "Works as designed" is the least helpful, most infuriating thing one can say to a group of users who say the design is crap. Whoever wrote the use case for "star to display on home page and do practical" clearly hasn't used any other apps or websites before.

kymdusting

Yep, please add the ability to select all starred (or even create tags and select by tag?).

Thanks.

gah

Allow me to add my dissatisfaction with and disappointment in the Star function.

A <Select all starred> function (both within folders, and in the aggregate starred view) would be the logical second half to the starring function. Then the function to move/copy the selected files to an existing/new folder.

Rich

Feel free to start a feature request thread in the Share feedback forum.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Share-an-idea/ct-p/101002000

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