Several enhancements to commenting on files / photos

Overview - to use Dropbox as a discussion board for files (and in my case, particularly photos).

Several things could be done to improve this.

While viewing the contents of a folder, dropbox shows thumbnails of any image files, which is great. Add a red bubble icon over the top, together with a number that indicates how many new comments are on a file; new comments are those you haven't yet seen.

Currently there is a notification (bell) icon. Add a new icon (speech bubble) for comments.

Currently if I'm viewing the contents of a folder and there are photos, thumbnails are shown, which is great. If I click on one, a larger preview of that photo appears on the right-hand edge of screen, which is great. Above that larger version there is a speech bubble - I need to click that in order to add or view comments on this photo. When I click it, a panel appears below the photo saying "no new comments no this file". There is a button to "add new comment". When I click that, the entire screen reloads. It shows the photo in the main panel and it shows a comments panel to the right. Why the full reload? Why not bump the comments panel out from the right edge of screen and retain the thumbnail gallery at far left and push the larger preview - which was on right-edge of screen - to centre of screen (so comments panel fits on the right)? That way after catching up on the comments on this file I could just click another thumbnail to catch up on the next lot of comments. Indeed, rather than having to click the comments icon in order to view the comments, give me a user setting where I can say "display comments by default" so when I click a thumbnail, both the full size image and the comments panel appear at the same time? This would speed up workflow.

So the biggest issues right now are that while I've viewing a folder with, say, 50 photos in it, there is absolutely nothing guiding me to where the comments and discussion are happening.

You could take this a step further - in the left side of screen is the panel "folders" - you could have icons (speech bubbles) over the folder names that contain numbers - the number reflects how many comments are new to you and located within that folder. That way I could browse my folder tree in order to locate where new comments and discussions are. 

Take it further again - if there are no new comments, then instead of a red speech bubble with a red dot containing a number (the same way your notification bell icon at top-right of screen is a grey bell icon with a red dot with a white number in it), you can display a grey dot with a number inside indicating how many comments are contained in that folder overall (with, say, a max being 99 or 99+).

Another idea - currently when you mouseover a thumbnail image while browsing a folder, the star icon appears as an outline. You can click that in order to star the file. Why not also have a speech bubble icon? Click it to immediately view the current comments and be able to add a new comment. Again, it's all about speeding up the workflow to facilitate discussions on the files in the folder.

Take that idea further again - why not have a user setting that allows me to "display interactive icons by default"? If I say "yes", then permanently show the star (and the newly-suggested speech bubble) icon(s)? Personally, I hate having to hover over things in order to discover what functionality is present. I understand the design rationale to get rid of clutter - but why not give users a choice? I'd rather see exactly what options are there. Further, if you showed speech bubbles here, then this is where you could put a red or grey dot over the top to show the number of new (or total) comments against each file. (I just realised you have far more functionality appear on hover - like share, link, edit and more ... so maybe don't show them all, or maybe make the user setting so that I can specify which, of all these features, I want permanently shown without requiring mouseover. At the very least, I want speech bubble icons telling me where comments are happening, to be shown permanently.)

That will do for starters.