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I've set my iOS camera uploads to add only new photos, but it's trying to re-upload everything.

I went from a iPhone 11 to a iPhone 16 Pro a few months ago. I backed up photos to Dropbox before I moved everything to the new phone. Had issues with the new phone and Apple had me do a full factory reset, and then I was only able to download certain (minimal) apps from my cloud, to prevent the new phone from picking up anything old that might have caused the issues. This shouldn't affect my Dropbox app, since that is a separate cloud. But now when I back up photos, it is scanning my ENTIRE library of photos, which is many years worth, it seems, and it seems to want to download all of these photos, most of which are already in my Dropbox. I went to settings to see if selecting "Back up/New photos only" would solve this issue, but it only identifies new photos as of today, not the past couple of months since I got this phone. But then I looked at what's in my Camera Uploads folder, and there are photos from as recent as early December, but not current. With my old phone, Dropbox would only grab the new photos since last upload. So what am I doing wrong here?

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Hi @jlo-nyc - sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

Can you please clarify if you were using the Dropbox mobile app since you got your new iPhone or if you just started using it?

Your camera uploads folder should be containing all photos and videos from all the mobile devices you've linked to your Dropbox account and enabled the automatic camera uploads feature on.

In the meantime, you can manually upload the files you'd like through the relevant (+) button too.

In any case, let us know more and we'll take it from there.

Hi Walter - thanks for your reply. I have used the Dropbox mobile app for iPhone for years. So I had it on my iPhone 11, and then I had to download it (fresh) from Applications, not from my iCloud, when I had to reset my new iPhone 16.

So you're correct, I see all the old photos and videos from my previous uploads I had done with my iPhone 11 and any previous iPhones. I used to just open up the Dropbox app on my phone, and it would sync with my Photos app and find the ones that it didn't already have in Dropbox, and upload those as "new" to my Dropbox app/Camera Uploads folder. But when I do it now, on my iPhone 16, it seems to think all the photos from the past many years are "new" and I see it trying to sync thousands of photos+videos.

Does that make sense? How can I just get it to do what it used to do, sync with Photos app and only grab what's not already in Dropbox/Camera Uploads?

Thank you!

Hi @jlo-nyc, are you syncing photos to your phone using iCloud or iTunes in some way, which is duplicating the photos on your device, and then having them re-uploaded again?

Hm... I do have photos sync via iCloud but they should not be re-uploading to my phone. But how do I check that?

That would be a setting in the phone or your machine, depending on how it is set up. That would be something you would need to check on your end.

When using the camera upload feature, you can select which folders you want to upload to your Dropbox account, so if the photos are coming from a different folder instead of the camera roll, then you can deselect that folder.

Uploads from Photos app to Dropbox are just from the main library, and they always went straight to the Camera Uploads folder in Dropbox.

I have to check on the re-uploading question, I have no idea how to do that (just looked in iCloud and Photos settings and don't see anything about that). That seems like an odd and useless default if it is actually re-uploading photos after they are synced to iCloud. But who knows. I'll report back.

I'm back - I tried to research but I can't be sure that iCloud is re-uploading to my Photos app as , nor can I figure out what to do about that. So I just tried a work around, but I don't think it worked. I can see the last photos that were backed up to my Dropbox, so I know where it stopped. So I tried to save new photos taken since then into an Album in my Photos app, and then in the Dropbox app, Camera Uploads, I selected to Upland from [that new album], and turned on camera uploads. But Dropbox seemed to be searching thousands of photos in my Photos app, not just that album. Is it because it's an album instead of a folder? It allowed me to select it so that was confusing. But if it needs to be in a folder, I can do that. Thank you so much for your advice.

Hey @jlo-nyc, does the Photos app on your new phone currently contain the photos from your previous phone?

When you say that the Dropbox app is searching for older photos, would you mind sending us a screenshot of where you see that?

Yes, it does contain photos from my previous phone. So when I set up my new phone, I did connect to my iCloud and so the old photos that are not archived, I suppose, are in this new phone.

With my old phone, I would open up Dropbox app, select Photos in the nav at the bottom of the screen, and I could see "Backing up..." at the top scrolling through my Camera Roll, and it would take anywhere from 1 to a few minutes to figure out what was new (often a couple hundred), and then it would upload those. Now it's taking far longer, and it goes through thousands of photos. The last time I tried to upload, before I turned off uploading, the backing up function went well past 10k photos, and it wasn't done yet. Having tagged all the new stuff into an Album (in my Photos app) earlier, I can say there are. not even 5k photos/videos that are new since last upload to Dropbox. So is "Backing up..." just reviewing everything? It just stopped doing that. Now it says "Running camera uploads. Scanning your photo library..."

That said, it does seem to be uploading the new photos/videos since the last upload in early Dec.

It went back to "Backing up..." function after all of that, and then scanned through more than 9k photos/videos again. And then back to "Running camera uploads. Scanning your photo library..." where it seems to be staying, at least for almost 10 minutes now. It used to say something like there are no new photos when it was done.

Thanks for the additional info, @jlo-nyc.

It might have to do with the fact that even though the photos are old, this is a new phone, so it needs to scan them.

Have you tried to delete the Dropbox app, restart the device and then reinstall it, to see if it helps?

I haven't tried that, but when I had to factory reset the new phone, because something was causing other issues, I had to download most apps as new, so this current app was technically a new download and install. Does that make sense?

It does make sense, @jlo-nyc.

Can you open the Dropbox app, tap on "account" and then on the gear icon, to find the version of the app that you're using, please?

It's App version 406.2.2

Thanks for the clarification @jlo-nyc

Could you also send us a screenshot of the screen you get stuck on so that we can have a visual too?

Can you see this?

This is where it ultimately got stuck though

seems the files are too large for upload here, how can I do this?

Are you getting any particular error when trying to upload your screenshot here @jlo-nyc?

Yes - it said the files were too large.

In that case, you can try grabbing a new, smaller screenshot or use a shared link instead @jlo-nyc

[removed so as to protect the daily limit for data sharing]

Hi from me too, @jlo-nyc! Thanks for these screenshots. Can you send me one more visual of what you see when opening the camera upload settings on your iOS device (including the albums from which your camera uploads feature is currently uploading images)?

Dropbox uploads from my iPhone's Photos app, from the main library, no specific folder. I uploaded the screenshot of my camera upload settings from my Dropbox app to this folder (I assume that's what you were asking for):

After reviewing our entire thread, I believe the best course of action would be for you to set camera uploads to backup "new photos only". Then, you can manually upload any older photos that aren't already online.

Keep in mind that if the "All my photos" option uploads everything from scratch -which seems possible in this case- there may not be a way to prevent it.

You also mentioned having some duplicate content, right? If I misunderstood, feel free to clarify. However, if duplicates are an issue, please check the file names and sizes of the files and compare them to confirm they're identical.

Thanks - When I select "new photos only" it sets a start date to today (which I cannot control), so I assumed it's not looking for new photos based on sync, it's date based. I don't remember it being like that in the past, but that makes me think it will only start looking for new photos taken on or after that date. Is that not correct? Will it upload new photos I took since the last upload? That's why I had selected "All photos" in the Back up setting.

I don't know that there are actually duplicate content issues, I just wasn't clear on why Dropbox was scanning EVERYTHING rather than only grabbing what was new.

I tested this on my end, and it is indeed date based.

if you select "new photos only" today, then it should upload content from your camera roll starting today, or from the moment you enabled the feature.

Thanks for testing that. So this is the issue for me, I don't do this back up daily, so this is not helpful. This is why I had it set to "All my photos" but it seems to scan EVERYTHING. I'm pretty sure it did not used to do this, thus the questions and why I'm so baffled by how this works. Perhaps I'm wrong and it was always like this, but I'm quite certain it was not scanning thousands of photos for possible uploading when I had the app on my iPhone 11. So... I guess I'm at a loss, and probably should just keep it set at "All my photos" and just know that it will take a while before it determines what needs to be uploaded.

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