How I Use Dropbox: Emmet

[Amy]

Welcome back to our ‘How I use Dropbox’ series. You might have seen us talking about how Dropboxers use Dropbox, whether it’s to keep in touch with family, organize their house, trips and files and next up, we have Emmet! 

Emmet joined the Community team earlier this year and in a past life, he was a photographer and had a serious process for organizing those photos and files to make sure he saved those memories for everyone else too. Check his story out below. 

For about 5 years, I worked as photographer for University College Cork, providing photos and other creative content for the student societies in the college. There were over 100 individual societies in the college, and I would photography over a dozen events each week. 

During my 5+ years working in UCC, I uploaded over 250GB of photos, videos and graphics, for students, and the college, to use and share as part of their activities. Organising that many photos, videos and more could have been a bit of a nightmare, but thankfully Dropbox was there to help keep everything organised. 

I created individual folders to house the content for each society and created sub-folders inside these for each event. I would share these folders with the society/societies involved, and they would use this content for promotion, and sharing on their social media channels. This allowed me to keep everything organised and easy to find. At the end of each year, I would create a new folder to contain all the events that year, and ensure I could easily find them in the next year. 

Dropbox proved an invaluable tool over my years as a photographer, and allowed me to quickly access all of the photos based on the host of the event, time of the event etc. At the end of each year, I would create a compilation video, celebrating the hard work of all the student societies. When I was creating this, I found the Photo tab on Dropbox invaluable, as I would be able to see the thousands of photos I took every year, and quickly pick out my favourites for the video. 

It was an amazing tool for organizing my files then - and still is today, so it’s great to be able to use it at work everyday now. 

In fact, Emmet’s filing system was so good that he managed to dig out a 10 year old photo he took of me on my first day of college - not knowing our paths had crossed before but Dropbox is really amazing sometimes! 

How do you use Dropbox? 

[johnboldon]

To be honest I find Dropbox to be absolutely useless for organising photos. OK on a desktop you can get a gallery like view . But how many photos would that be and how can you find a particular photo based upon tags? Search will only search on filenames. So if you have tagged your photos with locations or names of the people in them you cannot search based on those fields. 

It is a big problem that Photos view seems to display all photos in the entire Dropbox.

You cannot focus down by selecting folders, so in Emmet's example where he might want to navigate to a folder showing a single year's photos this is not possible.

You can only select individual folders in the files view. And there you just have the option of viewing by name or by modified. So if you want to see photos in taken date order that is not possible.

How useless is that?

[Rabin Bogati]

Dear Emma, I am not able to see the display of my files and folder in the Dropbox, despite I successfully logged in. But I can see the files in my other devices. I am currently using MacBook Pro. Regards  

[Walter]

Hey @Rabin Bogati  - thanks for joining the discussion here and sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

Could you please send us a screenshot of what's troubling you so that we can have a visual too?

[Perry P.2]

Hi Emmet,

I too, and a retire photographer.  I think I use Dropbox to organize my photos in a similar manner to you.  But, you seem to be able to find photos faster than I can.  I can get to an event pretty fast by knowing the name or a part of it.  But I have to look through the photos to get to a specific photo if I do not know the photo ID.  If you can tell me how you do that, I would greatly appreciate it.  Can searches be done by date, keywords, etc.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Perry

[Jay]

Hi @Perry P.2, thanks for messaging the Community!

You can use the Photos page on the Dropbox site to view all images on your account.

If you need any more details, feel free to message back!