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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 re...
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
I have spent ALOT of time creating and organizing Dropbox photo albums over the years. The "value added" that they provide is that a single photo file can be included in multiple albums, albums based on different themes, events, etc that all relate to that single photo. I have also spent ALOT of time, working with thousands of photos to set the "Date Taken" file attribute, which is the default (and only) sort order available in Dropbox albums.
The recent Dropbox announcement about "changes" to the Photos page appears to take this all away, with no honest explanation offered, and no substitute functionality evident.
It is incredible to me that functionality would be removed from a product in this way. The claim that Dropbox is "focused on building better ways for you to work with all file types" would be laughable if it weren't so distressing.
Is "Date Taken" (and I'm not talking about "Date Modified" here) going to be offered as a sort option in the File list displays that we are left with?
The announcement states that "Dropbox won’t be able to automatically convert existing albums into folders", and instead I should create new file folders to match my albums and "Select the photos you’d like to move by clicking the checkboxes to the left of the file names". Do you really expect me to do this for thousands and thousands of file names?
It's seeming to me that my time might be better invested elsewhere.
I agree completely. I have invested a great deal of time in finding photos that very often do not have the right date in them and come from multiple folder sources on dropbox. They have provided no way that I can see to easily preserve these groupings in folders. I would have to "navigate" to them, but they provide no way to easily identify the locations of the photos. Even the file names are suppressed in the photo view. I also considered "select all" and download, thinking I might then upload them back into a folder, but many of my albums exceed the 1GB download limit. I would have to break the album up into pieces and download and upload small chunks at a time. This is so lame of Dropbox, I just can't believe it. If they could provide a simple migration path, I would be much happier, but they are just leaving us all to pick up the mess ourselves. I've estimated it would take me 15 minutes to 1/2 hour to painstakingly download each album and re-upload somewhere else (not Dropbox), of which I have 80 albums. So, I guess it will take me something like 20 to 40 hours to go through and preserve my albums. Dropbox, can't you provide a migration path? For example, allow people to "select all" in the photo album view for a given album, and provide a "copy" option. That way, I could at least go through and copy each album's photo and video files to a folder, which is what Dropbox says is my way to handle photos from here on out. Or, give me a way to create a larger download, at least, so I could get the photos back off in the grouping created by the album. Surely, these are not complicated options to provide, given that you already provide a way to "select all" in the photo view. I am apalled at the cheery, glib instructions from Dropbox. Lame. lame. lame, Dropbox.
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