Selecting all starred photos

[bobbo1]

I need to select all of the photo's that we recently starred.  The only way I can see them all together is on my homepage but from there you cannot select multiple photo's and there are no checkboxes.   Shift or control mouse clicks don't work.

When I go to the folder I know they are in there is no way to sort by "starred" or filter "starred".

A star appears next to those photo's which have been starred when I am in that folder but as soon as I click the checkbox the stars for all other "starred" photo's just disappear.

I have also tried searching for "starred" photo's in the search bar but it doesn't come back with the correct results.  

I had my wife go through over 6,000 photo's to figure out which one's she'd like in our holiday calendar and she "starred" over 300 photo's.  

Also tried going into the attributes on the local files on my PC hoping that there was some tag that dropbox adds to these files that I could sort by but still nothing.

If I can't figure this out I am a DEAD man LOL!  Really not funny 😞

Is there is no way other way to do this other than opening each individual picture from my homepage and downloading them 1 at a time?

[martin_z1]

Hi again

OK - I have managed to do this.  It helps that I am using Linux and working on the command line, so this is not going to be useful for everyone - but here's how it goes.

a) Go to the "starred" list and ensure you click on the link to show ALL of them.

b) right-click on the page and download it to a file, called, say, photolist.html

c) now the following commands are what you need:-

This one splits all the html commands onto single lines.

sed "s/>/>\n/" photolist.html > photolist1.html

This one extracts all the file names you need - with the subdirectories they are in.

grep "^<a.*starred" > photolist1.html | sed "s/^.*preview\///" | sed "s/sed "s/\" class=\"sta.*//" > filelist.txt

No guarantees! But it worked for me. Hope this is helpful.

[martin_z1]

Hi again

I've just had reason to repeat the exercise I did in the previous post, and I've got a couple of typos in the commands.

The two commands should be:-

sed "s/>/>\n/g" photolist.html > photolist1.html

grep "^<a.*starred" photolist1.html | sed "s/^.*preview\///" | sed "s/\" class=\"sta.*//" > filelist.txt

NOTE ALSO - there is a maximum number of starred files that can be displayed on the front page - 1000.  As many as you like can be starred, but only a thousand are displayed.

[mri]

thank you, 

---

wrote:

The only way that worked for me was through Dropbox's Iphone App.

Open the App.

Go to the folder with your files, some of which are already "starred".

Select "List View" [this does not work while on "Grid View"].

Tap on Select (top right).

And then Select from your list - manually, one by one - all the files that have the "star" next to their name.

It's not the most straightforward way and Dropbox can definitely improve this functionality, but if your starred files are not in the thousands and/or if you are patient enough, this solution should work.

---

that is a solution! It is still a fail from dropbox, but no my star-selection wasnt pointless!

[IainB]

Thanks for this suggestion, mri. True, Dropbox need to sort this, but it's good to have a work-around.

Appreciate your help.

Cheers

Iain

[JBphoto]

Agree - I starred photos with the assumption that the collection could than be accessed - this is not functional

[Rich]

There is nothing for Dropbox to fix here as the feature is working as intended. The purpose of starring a file is to make it appear on your Dropbox Home page for easy access; nothing more.

• https://help.dropbox.com/desktop-web/star-doc-file-folder

[BobbeeV]

This is one of the many reasons its time to find a new app for my photos.  Dropbox is not user friendly and my photos  and docs are too important to have here.

[Roshanak_baghi]

I have come to the same solution. The problem is how to transfer my photos back to my phone without losing g the time stamps and therefore then put them in the new app. I have been battling with this for 2 months!

[BobbeeV]

I downloaded to my Mac then uploaded to Amazon. Long process but worth it

[pablopk]

I could not agree with the utter lunacy of this restriction. When it comes to file organizing and photo organizing in particular Dropbox is beyond inadaquete. Finding, moving, organizing photos is nigh near impossible to do efficiently. This is especially irksome when it comes to trying to share images. If I want to share a group of photos I have to put them in their own folder, but sorting photos requires looking at them and there is no way to tag photos for sorting or moving to a file efficiently. 

In all seriousness Dropbox, if you can't fix this problem this will probably be my last year using your service.