Does Dropbox compress photos and videos when uploading directly from the iOS app?

Question

Hello,

I recently started backing up my photos from my iPhone via the Photos App + Dropbox extension, but I noticed that the file sizes changed drastically between what was displayed on the iPhone vs. what showed up on my Dropbox desktop app. Furthermore, I noticed that some of my videos went from 60fps down to 30fps. I even tried uploading said video directly from the Dropbox app and while it went back to 60fps, the file size was still about half what showed up in the Photos app.

What's going on here? Is there any way to force the upload to maintain original quality? It seems a bit ridiculous for it to compress the files when the whole point of a backup is to be 1-1 with the original.

Thank you,

Jordan

Walter · Answer

If you open the Dropbox mobile app and manually upload them from there through the (+) icon what are the results @JordanR?

JordanR · Answer

Hi Walter,

I'm manually backing them up using the following steps:

* Open (Apple's) Photos App
* Select Photo(s) & Video(s) to upload
* Select Share Icon (Arrow pointing upward)
* Select Dropbox
* Upload to a folder

Apologies for my frustration earlier, I just spent a lot of time these past few days backing up photos from 2024 and 2025 only now to find out some (or many?) were compressed. I'm using the latest iOS app on an iPhone 17 Pro Max running the latest iOS.

An explanation that comes to mind is that I have modified/edited some of the photos/videos, and because of that, Dropbox might be 'compressing' them to make them into a file that can be backed up.

Thank you,

Jordan

Walter · Answer

Hey @JordanR - thanks for using Dropbox and welcome to our Community!

Can you please clarify the exact steps you take to upload your photos from your iPhone to Dropbox?

Are you using the automatic camera uploads feature or another way?

Let me know more and we'll take it from there!