How to speed up Dropbox uploads on iPhone

[ashley m.18]

Dropbox sync only happens when I have the Dropbox iPhone app actively open, and even then it takes about 5 minutes to upload a single photo. This is for camera roll sync.

[Ian F.14]

When carousel was introduced, there was much criticism about why a separate app was needed, but to be fair it worked really well. It was quick and didn't suffer from the "Dropbox has paused upload" messages.

Now that it has been retired, you would have thought that this good code would have been integrated back into Dropbox, but sadly it clearly hasn't and if anything things have got worse. It's painfully slow and isn't using the available bandwidth, and we're back to having to keep re-opening Dropbox to keep things going, even though background upload is on and so is location services.

[Petr M.3]

How can it be that the feature (instant, fast upload) that was working perfectly before is now broken?  

[Doug P.15]

Same problem....any better work around?

[Chris B.6]

Same problem.  Carousel work fabulously, the iOS Camera Upload feature takes an age.  Background barely works, it might work for about 2 minutes after switching to another app.  At this point, I wait until it is time to go to bed, turn off automated screen locking, plug in the charger and then open the app.  Maybe 8 hours later my 1 minute 25 second video will be uploaded when I wake up in the morning.

Ridiculous, especially since you had this all worked out with Carousel.

[Ali H.1]

i have several iOS devices.  all but my primary (iPhone 6S+) transfers photos to DropBox desktop app just fine... by my primary device gets stuck forever in the importing process and nothing happens. 

Any idea what could be going wrong?
(i've tried re-installing the applications on both ends, no success)

Thanks!

[John C.12]

Where is DrioBox Solution to this?????? Itsinfuriating and unbearable as carousel worked so perfect!! I would pay for carousel to return!!!

[Dmitri K.]

This is ridiculous. Took me 4 hours to upload 20 photos and not it's stuck on 9 photos remaining for several days now. WTF dropbox?

[Richard P.10]

I'm having the same issue.  In the iOS app, it takes a while when it moves to the next picture to upload before the upload bar starts progressing,  When the progress bar starts, it goes very quickly, but it takes a long time to start progressing.  It is almost as if it is doing some sort of processing or something.  I wonder if it has to do with the large number of pictures on my camera roll.  I have ~45k pics in there.  I have iCloud Photos turned on so they're not all actually on my phone, but DB may still have to do some sort of processing where as the number of photos increases, the "processing time" also increases.  Just a theory.

[Caesar W.]

For me, Dropbox always uploads all the images first before the videos, even if they are newer. The images actually upload reasonably fast (in the order of seconds, maybe because they are small). My upload backlog seems to comprise entirely of videos.

So my contribution towards the theory is that the files are being uploaded in order according to file size from small to large.

[Chris R.36]

I set my phone not to auto-lock and left it plugged in overnight with the dropbox app running and it uploaded about ten photos total, of the hundreds left in the queue.

Dropbox, this is unacceptable.