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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 remants of the Carousel functionality - which makes me wonder what the point was in purchasing it in the first place:

"After that date, you’ll no longer be able to create or share albums on the web, or browse photos in the current timeline view. However, all your photos will remain safe in your Dropbox account."

Even funnier, it says:

"Creating a better photos experience

We’re continuing to work on new photos and file experiences on dropbox.com. As we learn more about how our users prefer to work with photos, we’ll launch improvements to the experience."

With these changes there will be no photos experience that is any different to normal files. If they remove camera uploads, that would be the last straw for me and I'll be moving to a different service.

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RichardDBX

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

All comments

Sarah N.6

I am checking Flickr which has a great way to build albums through their "organize" function - however not sure of their share function and collaboration - anyone else have any experience of this or other options.

Simone C.9

@RichardDBX wrote:

Hi all,

Thank you all for the comments and questions about the upcoming changes to photos.dropbox.com. We understand this decision impacts the way you share and organize your photos, and we’d like to address a few points of confusion.

After June 30, the web Photos page will continue to be a place where you can view all of your photos across Dropbox folders, but will no longer contain the speed scroller functionality, or the ability to create, share, or modify albums and sets of multiple photos. All of your photos will remain safe in your Dropbox account, and there are still many ways for you to work with photos in Dropbox. The changes to this page do not impact the way you share and organize photos through Dropbox folders, shared folders, or shared links.

The updated page (dropbox.com/photos) will display your photos as thumbnails. You will be able to sort your photos the same way you can sort photos on the photos.dropbox.com page today — by the creation date of the photo.

We apologize for the confusion around the changes to albums, and we’d like to provide some additional details:

After June 30, you’ll no longer be able to create new albums, or make changes to existing albums on photos.dropbox.com.

If you’ve shared an album or set of photos via a Dropbox shared link, those links will continue to work after June 30. You can access these links from the links page in order to view your photo albums.

We’ve added additional tips and suggestions to our Help center article on how to recreate your albums as Dropbox folders, and how to use other Dropbox features to share and organize your photos.

There are no changes to photos you’ve shared, or will share in the future, through Dropbox shared folders or shared links. Any existing photos you’ve shared through these methods will not be impacted by the changes to photos.dropbox.com.

We recognize that this change may cause frustration. Thank you all for the feedback you’ve shared with us, and please keep it coming. We’ve communicated this feedback to our team and will use it to inform future Dropbox features.

Regards,

Richard

WHO "accepted" Richard at DROPBOX's "solution" so that this thread could be marked by DROPBOX as SOLVED?

Simone C.9

I've heard GOOGLE photos and Google Drive might be the way to go.

Igor V.1

In other words, you're taking away the ONLY tool we had in Dropbox to organize photos.

Folders? Is that a joke?

If at Dropbox you think folders are an appropriate way to organize ANYTHING, you are still living in the 20th century.

Wake up before all your customers are gone, Dropbox.

bwraith

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.

Simone C.9

Thanks for your contribution to this page brwaith. It is quite incredible that DROPBOX are not replying (yet) to this new thread.

cdysthe

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?

Simone C.9

Please can everyone double post ie here but also in the new thread as this one is down as "solved" by DROPBOX and so no longer receiving attention:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Photos-and-videos/The-Photos-Page-is-Changing-Chapter-2-UNSOLVED/m-p/219730#M8250

Rich

I have merged the two threads and will merge any new ones that are created as well. Creating duplicate threads will not accomplish anything here. Every comment being posted to this thread is being reviewed by Dropbox. THIS is the thread that they are watching. Starting a second (or third, forth, etc.) conversation in a new thread will only mean that Dropbox does not see all of your comments.

It is very common in cases like this for Dropbox to not respond often but they DO read every post made to a thread that they are watching, and they are watching this one (confirmed by my contacts within Dropbox). Continuing the conversation on this thread is your best option for making sure that Dropbox understands how you feel.

Also, this thread is marked as Solved so that the Dropboxer's reply would be brought to the top of the thread for all to see, because everyone knows that most people don't bother reading the entire thread of a multi-page discussion.

Please keep the discussion going (I agree with all of you here!), but please keep it isolated to this thread. Any additional threads will be merged into this one with no further notice.

Thank you.

Anna L.25

I have an enormous number of clients' photos clearly stored as Albums, to issue to journalists and press, in a format they can view entire prospective features & stories. I echo others pleas for Dropbox to provide a quick, efficient method of transferring Albums into Files and to think long and hard about how it is handling its clients. I began following the laborious instructions to download an Album, then upload as a File, and gave up. This method is achingly slow, reminiscent of something from the dark ages. What are Dropbox thinking? Currently it shows a total disregard for what clients actually want = zero customer service. Unless it can offer solutions, and quickly, I like many others will willingly switch services.

Aardvark

@Anna L.25 wrote:
I have an enormous number of clients' photos clearly stored as Albums, to issue to journalists and press, in a format they can view entire prospective features & stories. I echo others pleas for Dropbox to provide a quick, efficient method of transferring Albums into Files and to think long and hard about how it is handling its clients. I began following the laborious instructions to download an Album, then upload as a File, and gave up. This method is achingly slow, reminiscent of something from the dark ages. What are Dropbox thinking? Currently it shows a total disregard for what clients actually want = zero customer service. Unless it can offer solutions, and quickly, I like many others will willingly switch services.

Thing is, we want the albums feature kept. No one wants a folder solution that requires file duplication using up more of our quota. For anyone looking for an alternative, Microsoft OneDrive has albums which are how how Dropbox is now. They also have a camera upload function and if you're running Windows 10 it integrates into the OS quite well. Looking at how things go, this will be the 3rd switch I've made to OneDrive from Dropbox. Last time it was when OneDrive introduced 1TB storage and Dropbox said they wouldn't. I came back because OneDrive copied entire files on changes rather than just the changes. They've fixed that now so I'm going to look at using that. There is also Google photos which is free and unlimited for photos and videos under 16MP/1080p.

Charles L.5

Darren, Curious what "third-party app" you purchased, and what functionality of the Carousel app did it replicate that you missed?

Charles L.5

Rich, I am still waiting for your reply to this post from a couple of days ago:

Rich, a couple of questions you may be able to answer:

1. What is "speed scroller functionality?" What does it do? How does one currently use it? There are two types of "scrolling" on timeline. The first is that ability to move backwards and forwards through your photos once you open any one of them. The alternative would require you to open and close each photo. The second is right scroll-bar that, once clicked and dragged, shows dates, enabling you to quickly locate photos taken at a certain time. That is tremendously useful. So which does Dropbox consider "speed scroller functionality?" Also, what is the reason for eliminating these basic photo tolls? Is it a limitation of the a new Dropbox UE that is being rolled out, or are legal considerations at play?

2. If I understand the Dropbox doublespeak, all photos will essentially be kept in what is now the "Camera Uploads" file of the non-Timeline Dropbox. I don't use albums much, but as I understand albums it is essentially a series of virtual foldes with photo links. This enables a user not to have to keep or make multiple copies of the same photo in different folders, and of course saves space. This tech is ancient prior art -- not patentable. As I understand the change, you will now have to create multiple copies of the same photo and create new folders (instead of albums) to put them in. As you can tell from the comments, that's not going over well with Dropbox users who use albums. So, if my understanding is right, a few questions:

(i) Is this about the limitations of the new UE, or is Dropbox just trying to get users to max out their limits faster?

(ii) does this change precurse Dropbox rolling out and charging an additional fee to preserve (or perhaps enhance) the photo functions currently available?

(iii) in the future, if I want to tag and share selected photos with selected persons (which I can now do by a link, but without creating a link, will that functionality continue to exist.

(iv) Will a user still be able to post selected photos to FB and other social media. (5) and finally, why all the marketing double-speak? I can't believe Dropbox is incapable of using simple and clear prose and direct messaging. It is clearly (and justifiably) apprehensive about how this is going to go over with users, but I usually advise my software clients to be upfront if a newer version is going to eliminate essential or desirable functionality.

I appreciate your time and responses.

Rich

Charles L.5 wrote:
Rich, I am still waiting for your reply to this post from a couple of days ago:

Those are questions for Dropbox to answer, not me.

Darren S.1

@Charles L.5

It's called Unbound for Dropbox - Unbound for Dropbox by Ryan Harter
https://appsto.re/gb/jOV7I.i

The main thing I wanted was to be able to put it on my wife's phone and have her photos uploaded to my DB account giving her access to my entire account with the main DB app.

Charles L.5

Thanks!

Charles L.5

Oh, sorry. I mistook your user status ("Super User") for a Dropbox affiliation. I guess Dropbox isn't monitoring this site. Still, as a "Super User," do you have any idea what "speed scroller functionality" is?

Charles L.5

Richard,

Since Dropbox is purportedly monitoring this thread, can please answer the following questions, which have been outstanding several days:

1. What is "speed scroller functionality?" What does it do? How does one currently use it? There are two types of "scrolling" on timeline. The first is that ability to move backwards and forwards through your photos once you open any one of them. The alternative would require you to open and close each photo. The second is right scroll-bar that, once clicked and dragged, shows dates, enabling you to quickly locate photos taken at a certain time. That is tremendously useful. So which does Dropbox consider "speed scroller functionality?" Also, what is the reason for eliminating these basic photo tolls? Is it a limitation of the a new Dropbox UE that is being rolled out, or are legal considerations at play?

2. If I understand the Dropbox doublespeak, all photos will essentially be kept in what is now the "Camera Uploads" file of the non-Timeline Dropbox. I don't use albums much, but as I understand albums it is essentially a series of virtual foldes with photo links. This enables a user not to have to keep or make multiple copies of the same photo in different folders, and of course saves space. This tech is ancient prior art -- not patentable. As I understand the change, you will now have to create multiple copies of the same photo and create new folders (instead of albums) to put them in. As you can tell from the comments, that's not going over well with Dropbox users who use albums. So, if my understanding is right, a few questions:

(i) Is this about the limitations of the new UE, or is Dropbox just trying to get users to max out their limits faster?

(ii) does this change precurse Dropbox rolling out and charging an additional fee to preserve (or perhaps enhance) the photo functions currently available?

(iii) in the future, if I want to tag and share selected photos with selected persons (which I can now do by a link, but without creating a link, will that functionality continue to exist.

(iv) Will a user still be able to post selected photos to FB and other social media. (5) and finally, why all the marketing double-speak? I can't believe Dropbox is incapable of using simple and clear prose and direct messaging. It is clearly (and justifiably) apprehensive about how this is going to go over with users, but I usually advise my software clients to be upfront if a newer version is going to eliminate essential or desirable functionality.

I appreciate your time and responses.

Mike H.57

@Charles L.5 wrote:
Rich, I am still waiting for your reply to this post from a couple of days ago:

As far as I can tell Rich is just a user (although a "Super User") like you. So he probably doesn't know the answers to all of your questions. Dropbox employees are tagged as "Dropboxer"

Robert R.55

The information Dropbox sent out in its emails is confusing, incomplete, and is already being modified. The inability to share an existing file across multiple albums is a big problem for lots of people. Dropbox needs to publish a better description and guide rather than forcing us to search through Community postings and submit tech assistance requests. Again, it is confusing, incomplete and appears to be doing away with features that users depended on.

Rossi

Charles L.5

Thanks. I'm a little slow on the uptake for the forum, but figured that out, and reposted my questions to the guy with the Dropboxer tag.

Charles L.5

As an IP lawyer who has been working in the software/Internet/computing field since there was one, I am constantly surprised by how many companies have really bad messaging -- almost as if CRM were an afterthought. You really can't play "hide the peanut" when your user base is computer savvy. We're seeing an excellent example of that in this Dropbox change.

Robert R.55

"After June 30, you’ll no longer be able to create or share albums on the web, or browse photos in the current timeline view. Your photos will remain safe in Dropbox, and you can view them like any other file in your Dropbox. The quick scroll functionality of the current Photos timeline will no longer be available, but you'll be able to view all your photos in a redesigned page using the same link to Photos in the left navigation bar"

So what does this mean. I depend on using the timeline to find pictures that have been uploaded from my camera.

There is no description of how the "redesigned page" will work.

This whole thing is getting more and more confusing and its sounding like it will be a real problem.

Mark

Been doing some checking as that post marked as solution is, well, not one.

Been told it's been marked as a solution just to keep it up at top where people will see it.

I've no other information than that.

Simone C.9

Dear Mark

I of course agree with you and I do not really understand the "Super User" title, but it appears it has been marked by another "Super User" as solved, and that "Super User" Rich has merged all threads into one, including the new one I started as "Chapter 2, not solved"

This is all very frustrating. Perhaps as a "Super User" you are able to also, like the other "Super User", Rich, find out from DROPBOX themselves what is going on and explain to us all how a non Dropbox employee, albeit a "Super User" like yourself is able to take control of these threads, mark them as "Solved" and "Accepted" when they are not?

Mark

I can assure you it wasn't marked by Rich or myself. We have an unwritten rule that we don't mark posts as solution.

It was marked as solution by the person posting it (i.e. A Dropbox employee) so it bounces to the top and stays there, as I said, and for no other reason.

Chris T.20

I guess like most people I'll vote with my feet/cash. This change is likely to make Dropbox photo's useless to me so I'll prepare accordingly (or try to with their 1gb download limits). I'll start to utilise the Apple photo's solution for now and then when the change is announced, unless something amazing happens, it's likely that I'll remove the photo's - which then removes the need for me to pay for the 1tb plan.

I doubt it matters much to Dropbox and where they're trying to move to, but we'll see

Rich

Mike H.57 wrote:
As far as I can tell Rich is just a user (although a "Super User") like you. So he probably doesn't know the answers to all of your questions. Dropbox employees are tagged as "Dropboxer"

Yes, exactly.

Simone C.9 wrote:
I do not really understand the "Super User" title

Super Users are basically the moderators of the forum. We volunteer our time here, answering questions and providing help to other users like ourselves, directing people to open tickets where necessary, and generally try to keep things moving along in a civil manner. We are not employeed by Dropbox. We sometimes get early updates from the Dropboxers so that we'll be prepared to answer questions, but in many cases we're in the same position that you are; waiting for answers.

Simone C.9 wrote:
but it appears it has been marked by another "Super User" as solved, and that "Super User" Rich has merged all threads into one, including the new one I started as "Chapter 2, not solved"

It was marked as solved, but not by either of us. It was Dropbox that did so, simply to put the Dropboxer's reply to the top of the thread, as mentioned here and here. There is no other intent here than to make the post visible to anyone that opens the thread.

I did merge multiple related topics into this one so that the discussion wouldn't become fragmented. A single thread is easier to follow and maintain. Multiple threads end up having the same people posting in each one, posting the same information multiple times, cross-posting to say "I posted there over there too", etc. It serves no useful purpose.

Simone C.9 wrote:
explain to us all how a non Dropbox employee, albeit a "Super User" like yourself is able to take control of these threads, mark them as "Solved" and "Accepted" when they are not?

As stated above, Mark and I do not mark threads such as this as solved. That's up to Dropbox or the original poster of a thread. We can, however, merged and move topics, remove spammers, etc. Basically, simple moderation tasks to keep the forums flowing smoothly.

Hopefully that answers you questions about the Super Users.

Simone C.9

Thanks Rich and Mark for that clarification. As you have a close relationship with DROPBOX and have direct contact with them, something we as normal users do not have, can you tell us or give us an idea as to when or if we are likely to receive replies to the multitude of questions raised by various users on this topic and what the likelhood is of either the photo albums being retained, or , if not, a practical solution ie Dropbox do the hard work and save everyone here weeks of work and move our current albums into folders for us?

Your experienced advice/opinion would be much appreciated.

Rich

You're welcome, Simone.

This is one of those cases where we're in the same position as you. We're waiting for more information from Dropbox on this one. We know that they're watching the thread and are taking into account all of your comments, but that's it. We don't know when they'll make another reply.