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The Photos page is changing...
I've just seen the banner that says "". The gist is that they are removing the final remants of the Carousel functionality - which makes me wonder what the point was in purchasing it in the first place:
"After that date, you’ll no longer be able to create or share albums on the web, or browse photos in the current timeline view. However, all your photos will remain safe in your Dropbox account."
Even funnier, it says:
"Creating a better photos experience
We’re continuing to work on new photos and file experiences on dropbox.com. As we learn more about how our users prefer to work with photos, we’ll launch improvements to the experience."
With these changes there will be no photos experience that is any different to normal files. If they remove camera uploads, that would be the last straw for me and I'll be moving to a different service.
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
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It would be very helpful if there were a way to test the new interface in advance so users have time to find another solution if it doesn't work for them. I'm not sure how to pull that off, but I work for a company with high traffic sites. We always get to test new functionaliy in a before it goes live.
Great idea. I've beta-tested for Windows before and would be happy to participate in a beta-testing community for Dropbox. Soliciting members of this forum would be a natural fit for the folks at Dropbox.
I would be surprised if Dropbox hasn't been doing user studies on this before they decided on such a drastic change. If they didn't, they really should. I would be willing to beta test this as well as long as nothing changes permanently with my data.
Thanks Drakhar. Pretty depressing, but, I think you're right.
The annoucement is super confusing. It would help if Dropbox would release beta design page or a quick vidoe to give the users an idea of what exactly is changing.
runerat wrote:
The annoucement is super confusing. It would help if Dropbox would release beta design page or a quick vidoe to give the users an idea of what exactly is changing.
You can easily check it right now.
Log in to Dropbox via web browser.
1. Go to Files menu.
2. Create new folder in Dropbox.
3. Copy / Upload some photos to that folder.
4. Enter into that folder
5. And that's it! You can see and list photos in that folder as list or grid.
DO NOT use Photos menu to check you newly uploaded photos, that will be gone in June.
You can look at your photos same as you would any other file (no timeline, just folder browsing)
From what I gather they are going to treat Photos as any other file you have.
- Rich
Super User II
Drakhar wrote:
You can easily check it right now.
Log in to Dropbox via web browser.
1. Go to Files menu.
2. Create new folder in Dropbox.
3. Copy / Upload some photos to that folder.
4. Enter into that folder
5. And that's it! You can see and list photos in that folder as list or grid.
DO NOT use Photos menu to check you newly uploaded photos, that will be gone in June.
You can look at your photos same as you would any other file (no timeline, just folder browsing)
From what I gather they are going to treat Photos as any other file you have.
Not gone, but changed. From the announcement:
... the Photos page timeline will be updated to have a new look and feel.
So while the steps you listed are accurate to browse photos within your folders, the Photos page will still exist in some form. I believe that's what runerat was referring to.
So Dropbox's Help Page now explains what the "speed scroller" is. It's the scroll bar on the right side of the Photo Page that enables you to zip back through time to a particular date, and dispays the date as you scroll. This will no longer be available.
It's always a mystery when a company rolls out a new version that is less robust than the last. The speed scroller is an incredibly useful tool, not just for photos, but one could use it for any type of file.
The fact that such useful functionality, already built, is being deleted, together with the double-speak Dropbox is using in announcing and discussing this change, reinforces my suspicion that there is a licensing/patent issue lurking behind this change. They're acting a lot like Nancy Pelosi, "You'll just have to wait to see what's changed." Ominous.
i've decided to prepre for a Google transistion for data and photos making it as painless as possible if I find the Dropbox change(s) to be unacceptable. With a service like this which I use every days on muliple devices even small changes matter a lot. I dumped Google Photos because I was not able to get my pictures to show up in a folder in Drive. Not many people seemed to care about that, but for me, and the way I work, that was a must. So a drastic change like this in Dropbox really freak me out since there a multiple ways it can go wrong for me. And that is also why some sort of beta test or demo would make it much easier for me, and others for whom this is a big deal.
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