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Easy way to filter starred photos

I have a ton of photos that I've gone through one by one and starred the ones I want to be able to move into a separate folder. I now think that the "starring" exercise was useless. How do I find a way to select these starred photos easily to get them into a place where they can be printed?

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Jane

Hey @jv18, thanks for posting us on our Community & sorry to hear that you haven’t been able to move your photos the way you intended to. Let me follow-up with you a bit more closely & we’ll take it from there!

(Note: I've moved both threads you've posted on this discussion, so as to keep things neat on our Forum.)

As an initial point of reference, please note that starring a file, or folder adds a direct link to it on the Starred widget on the Dropbox Home page (on dropbox.com) & the Home tab (in the Dropbox mobile apps). While you can print them through the Starred items on your Homepage if you select each photo separately, it's my understanding that you'd prefer organizing your content in a folder before printing, is that right?

For that reason you may keep in mind that you will not be able to move your files to a different folder directly from your Starred items. Your best option at the moment would be to go back to the original file location >multi-select the files you’d like to move & use the website’s ➡️ ⬜ Move option, so as to get your photos in a new folder, navigate to the ones you’d like to print & use the 🖨️ choice. (Tip: In case you'd like to print your pictures in full resolution, it would be best for you to print them from your desktop- i.e. if you're using our desktop app- or download them locally & then print them.)

Other than that, I appreciate the time to share your interest on this functionality with us here. I’ve already made sure to add your voice to the feedback gathered internally for future reference. Your comments are extremely valuable as we're always looking for ways to improve & your posts here help us better understand your needs.

I hope that this points you towards the right direction, though please do let me know here in case you’d like more details about any of the above. Thanks & I hope you have a wonderful week ahead!

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jv18

I need to print photos in high quality format. They are wedding photos. Can someone help me find a FAST and HIGH quality solution? I need them ASAP!

Jane

(Note: I've moved both threads you've posted on this discussion, so as to keep things neat on our Forum.)

I hope that this points you towards the right direction, though please do let me know here in case you’d like more details about any of the above. Thanks & I hope you have a wonderful week ahead!

AndersAxelsson

There is no tumbnail in the home starred widget making it very hard to identify pictures. Is there a starred filter that could be used in combination with searches?

Rich

@AndersAxelsson wrote:
Is there a starred filter that could be used in combination with searches?

No, there isn't.

dmudd91

Horrible design... still... and its 2019. There is 0 point of this feature if they dont get moved to a starred folder. This feature should not be a thing if it is not useable as a way to organize files. All this does is confuse people becuase in every other place we have the ability to star or favorite, files/photos, it adds them to a new folder allowing quick and easy organization. This feature does nothing of the sort. Dropbox is file management, not a homepage.

Jane

Hey @dmudd91, thanks for taking the time to detail us how you'd like to group starred items in your account! Your honest feedback is indeed appreciated; positive or negative, everything you're sending us over helps us better understand your needs. As our team is always looking for ways to improve, I’ll make sure your feedback is passed along to them.

Please feel free to ping us back in case you have any further inquiries; our Community Wall is always open to your feedback or questions!

tlaw12

Agreed with the previous posters. Not being able to use "Starring" as means for filters makes the feature essentially useless. Do better Dropbox.

StudioCity

So true.

Willem_Hejister

When can we expect an update from Dropbox to be able to sort or filter on starred items? I would say that creating a folder where the starred photo's are automatically moved to is the ideal situation for me. I starred all photo's (400+) of my building project and want to make an Photobook out of it.

Regards Willem

jdarais

I have the same use case as this, only I want to move the photos into a separate, shared folder to give others access on the web rather than printing. Sadly, there's no efficient way to do this. Without the ability to sort/filter on starred, or being able to see more than 5 starred files at a time on the home page, starring is useless.

Other features I can think of that would help in this scenario would be tagging files, but of course only if you could search, sort or filter on tags; or at least a move/copy menu option from the file preview. But sadly, dropbox has none of these. I have over 1000 photos to look through, and now I'm wondering why I thought dropbox was a good place to try to organize them. A little better support for this type of scenario would go a long way!

jdarais

As a follow-up from my last comment: for what it's worth, the dropbox desktop app seems to recognize when a file is moved, in which case it just moves the file on the server rather than re-uploading. So, it's still reasonably efficient to just organize the files on your desktop, and dropbox will update to reflect the new file locations, though it would be nice to do it in the web app.

Jane

👋 Hello to all posting us their thoughts & observations here! We take your feedback seriously & I understand the reasoning behind your request. Kindly note that you can achieve what you have in mind with our new desktop application, which introduces a new surface that makes it easier to view, organize, and share your files.

I believe that this should address your request here, as using the new desktop app will allow you to add stars, pins, notes, lists, to-dos, @ mentions, and links to your files thus organizing your content more efficiently according to your needs & staying on top of priorities at all times. Following, it would be a good housekeeping practice to place the items/projects you’re mostly involved with on your file explorer on the left-hand side (i.e. under Starred Folders), just so as to keep them handy if you’re working on multiple projects simultaneously.

Spoiler

Now, my advice should also be helpful in what you’re describing as well @jdarais, as our new desktop app works alongside Finder & you can use those interchangeably. While I've now noted down your comments in my report internally detailing how you’d like to utilize a similar functionality on our website, I’m wondering if you’ve had a chance to see whether my suggestion is what you’re looking for.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read through, I’m here to hear your thoughts on this; please let me know how you get on with my advice & I’ll do my best to touch-base with you soon!

jdarais

Jane, thanks for the info about the new desktop app. I just enabled it, and it looks like pinning is much closer to what I've been hoping starring would do. Since the star feature is looking to be more focused around folders in the new desktop app, (starred folders show up in the left pane, and I haven't noticed anything new for starred files,) is there any plan to replace the star affordance in the Dropbox Preview page with one for pinning? Then, I could pin pictures as I'm reviewing them right in the Preview page, which would be absolutely awesome.

Edit: On second thought, pinning seems more geared towards sticking a few things at the top of a folder rather than flagging them for organization purposes. I was hoping I could multi-select pinned files, and do some action on them, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Starring may still be the concept I need for flagging files I want to move to another folder, in which case I'm back to my original request to allow the user to filter or sort by starred items, so it's easier to do bulk operations on a large number of starred files.

mezadri_m

Hi. Has this issue been solved yet? It’s hard to believe that starred pictures still can’t be saved in a separate folder.

Jane

Hey @mezadri_m, let me quickly re-phrase from my post above that currently Starred items are intended to surface & update on your Homepage, the Starred tab on your phone & on the Starred tab on the Dropbox desktop app.

That being said, we’re also gathering similar input on current functionality. If you’d like to add your voice to the the feedback our team is submitting, please feel free to post us your request on the Share an Idea section on the Community. Thanks!

mattlikestapas

I'm here to voice my opinion with the others. Just went through almost 3,000 wedding photos, starring the ones we want to print, now to find there's no way to just bulk-select or move starred files into a new folder. Worthless! I'd expect this kind of thing from google but dropbox seemed to be a tier above thus far. Will definitely be rethinking my subscription.

lyssjoyrob

Wait I really can't click a button to get all the pictures I just starred grouped together and moved to a separate folder??? I wish I had known that a few hours ago! Any idea if this will be a feature?

Lusil

Hey @lyssjoyrob, thanks for nudging us on this thread and for your feedback!

Our dev team is constantly working on implementing additional improvements, but we don't have a timeline to share.

Although there isn't currently a direct way that you can find starred items and move them to a new or existing folder, you can always post any ideas you have on features you'd like to see in the future in our Share an idea section.

In the meantime, if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to give us a shout. Thanks!

atlowry

I've found posts where people have wanted starred items to work like all other softwares (including gmail) since 2017 and it still hasn't been updates, so not likely to happen soon.

almbka

That is so poor

Daniel M.36

Has this been sorted out yet I want to be able to do something with the photos in the 10,000s that I’ve started over the years otherwise I might cancel and switch . Pretty simple feature I would have thought be standard

Susen

I am also in the same dilemma [starred an expansive number of files under the guise of it being a filter of ‘favorites’ of sorts] and am dissapointed that my paid Dropbox Plus is not able to replicate a ubiquitous interaction such as filter and export starred/favorites. The use case here would seem obvious: I am able to organize my files into categorical structures using folders and within that organizational structure, I need to be able to highlight specific files (predominantly images these days) that are the best, most important subset without relocating the file away from the original organizational structure.

Sherri-Ann

Same problem here. I have thousands of photos from a long roadtrip, went through all of them and starred the ones I wanted only to find out that I can't sort them by starred items. What a waste. Disappointing that 2 years later dropbox still hasn't done anything about it.