How do I stop Dropbox from Pulling Images from My uploaded files and displaying them?

There are so many ways in which your design is pitifully bad.

It's a collection of * Images *.  Calling it "Photos" is plain wrong.  It makes me at least feel sick looking at all my photos mixed up with all the documents I've ever scanned; all the pieces of artwork I've worked on designing; all the faxes I've sent & received; all the artworks I've been involved in working with; all the most attractive vulvae I've had the privilege to capture.  It's a collection that makes no sense whatsoever.

You let me view it, oh yes, by year, by month or by day.  And that's it. No indication whatever of what I'm looking at.  My actual files?  Copies of my files?  Some sort of virtualisation?  You offer no way to view by location.  Because you just built a half-assed feature without thinking it through.

JungleT wrote:

Your cretinous "Photos" tab isn't a copy of my image files, it's just another view of them isn't it?

Correct. The Photos page on the website is a special view that shows all image files from everywhere in your account. The Photos tab in the mobile apps works the same way.

I'm white-hot furious now.

Your cretinous "Photos" tab isn't a copy of my image files, it's just another view of them isn't it?

So that when the needlessly obtuse iPhone Dropbox interface shows you that 'Dropbox' is using 17Gb of data, and you search for why, find "Photos" and delete them, 500-1000 at a time, what's happening is you're deleting the only copy of your treasured, carefully stored 30-year photo collection that you had curated into individual dated folders with descriptions.

The interface of "Photos" here on the web versoon is so bad it's obvious whoever made it didn't believe in it either.  "233 photos selected" while the column header says "322"; you delete them and it's "deleting 185 files".

Dropbox has plummeted in my estimation.

Hi JungleT​,

Thanks for posting on the Community Forum and sharing your feedback.

I completely understand the frustration here. Can I ask, were you trying to delete these files on the browser or on the Dropbox application itself? I don't believe the browser can delete more than 1000 files at a time due to performance limitations of browsers but I believe we can identify an area for UI improvement here.

Let me know and we can discuss further!

Can't even 'Select All' as there's no such option.  I have to choose to display this pile of **bleep** I've no use for by year.  Then I can select a year at a time by choosing the check box.  Delete.  "Are you sure you want to delete these 2609 items".  Yes.  "Can't delete 2609 items".  Jesus wept.

Yup.  Absolutely idiotic.  What the hell are Dropbox's designers thinking about these days?  Are they all drunk all the time?

Absolutely ridiculous. Sometimes you do no want pictures randomly appearing... Its just commonsense... I'm suprised no one at Dropbox realises this. There's needs to be an on off switch... Imagine you open it in front of your team and there's a personal image you do not want others to see... A little commonsense when making features would help.

Thank you, Rich

Hi Hannah, I'm on an M1 Mac, using Ventura.  I'm using Dropbox 'Backup' for an external drive only. However, the files from the external hard drive that are uploaded to Dropbox are being perused by Dropbox. Any and all images from those files are also now showing in the 'Photos' area.  Although I do have Photos on this computer, the 'Pictures Folder' is empty, so no pictures are being uploaded from my main drive. I had already previously stopped Dropbox from having access to any part of the main computer (which has caused serious conflicts by itself.)