Sort photos by date taken

[Saepl]

He would be very nice to be able to have your photos sorted by date taken and not by date added to dropbox. The reason for this is because I want to use dropbox for my photo back up but having all the dates show up as the date I added them is not really the right way for them to be displayed

[Walter]

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[Helen44]

Or just by name ( I assume this chance is related to the dropbox app. It’s useless with the current sorting on metadata)

[SimonSimon]

Agree !

Dropbox is not great for photos.

It renames them all which is unnecessary and makes it almost impossible to later on identify and recover specific photos you may have lost. 

PLEASE vote for suggestion for camera uploads to have an option to NOT rename files! Thank you.

[es8]

yup. may not be best for photos but dropbox works really well for other areas comparing with other service providers (at least for me).

[kevinfreels]

"If you rely on feedback to make all of your decisions, a leader you are not." -- Me 

[Snowdog63]

If I go out & take a bunch of photos, say several hundred, and then I sit down a few days later & maybe crop or adjust a handful of them, I see no earthly reason why I would suddenly want the adjusted ones to be chronologically out of order with the rest. It makes no sense at all. A few months ago, any photos I'd adjusted would appear in my camera uploads with a "_1" at the end of the file name, alongside the original with the file creation date as the file name for both. I quite liked this duplication because it allowed me to keep a copy of the original.

Now, I don't get the originals & the adjusted ones are all out of order, named by the date I modified them. I'm not really sure how this is an improvement, as I now have to go through manually & rename the adjusted ones to sort chronologically again.

I use Adobe Bridge to organise my photos, so it's easy for me to see the correct date & find the photos that need renaming, but it's still an unnecesary chore. 

[Esbozo]

For some time now, as a paid user myself, I have seen Dropbox lagging behind. Anchored in the past.
Google Photos is not only light years ahead, but Dropbox doesn't even have an alternative for photo management. Even Onedrive has better image management.
I no longer bring up issues such as integration with M1 chips and many other things.
Dropbox is becoming that old thing that refuses to evolve. And it won't take long for customers to leave.

[kevinfreels]

Since when was organizing files by date an "idea"? 

What we're asking is that you FIX something that has BROKEN at some point that probably hasn't  been noticed by many users. The fact that the file attributes get modified - or are ignored - wasn't a problem in the earlier implementations of dropbox.  This isn't a request for some fancy new feature. 

[RobinWragg]

Please fix this, this is clearly a bug. The mobile app sorts photos correctly by Date Taken, but the website sorts photos by date added to Dropbox. It makes the Photos web feature unusable for me.

You have the functionality already, please just copy it across to the web version.

[kevinfreels]

This has been nagging at me for a long while because it reminded me of something and I couldn't remember what it was. But I ran into something yesterday that jogged my memory. 

A long long time ago, I had a Palm Treo 650 with Windows Mobile 3.1. Microsoft began surveying to see what kinds of features users wanted in the next iteration of Windows Mobile. They put together through consensus what they thought would be the next big thing in Windows Mobile. 

Less than a year later the iPhone was released and Microsoft learned quickly that they totally missed the mark. iPhone sales skyrocketed. Windows Mobile went dead within a year. They tried to retool and came up with Windows Phone. It failed too. They never recovered in the Mobile space.

You can't just rely on user polls to determine your direction. It puts Dropbox at a high risk of being relegated to the sidelines. Often, your customers just don't know what they want. Or they just accept whatever you throw at them grudgingly until they're worn out. I've seen dozens of things requested here that are so basic, many people don't even realize they're missing. Most of them are relatively simple fixed that would take a single developer less than a week to complete. You really need to stop sidelining and ignoring these things. If you don't it's very likely Dropbox will suffer the same fate as Windows Mobile. 

[Snowdog63]

Except that I know exactly what I want, which is to have my photos sorted in the order they were taken, not in the order they have been modified which, to me, is utterly moronic.

However, it's probably more accurate to say that this is about file naming.

The name on each of my photos is the date & time taken, which is how I like it. The *actual* name of each of my photos is probably "IMG followed by a number" & if they came into my Camera Uploads like that, I'd have to go through & name every single one using the metadata. Now, Dropbox used to give the files the date & time they were taken, which made my life very easy. Now, it has taken to naming the files by the modification date & time. This gets very awkward when I've sat & maybe cropped a few files at a later date to when they were taken. They all arrive in the wrong order & I have to go through & rename the adjusted ones.

The solution in the short term is very simple. I don't do any editing work in the phone any more. I wait for them to sync & do any work once they're in Dropbox with the correct name.

The reason for me making this thread is to query the idea of changing it to give them the name of the modification date which is a mindblowingly dumb thing to do.

If you took 100 photos on a country walk one day, why would you want ten of them appearing in the middle of a family gathering the following weekend, just because that's when you sat & cropped them during an idle moment? It makes no sense to have changed it.