The Photos page is changing...

[Darren S.1]

I've just seen the banner that says "The Photos page is changing on 30 June 2017 but your pictures will stay safe in your Dropbox account. Learn more". 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.

[Simone C.9]

Of course people can see all of the comments in the other link however to summarise, DROPBOX are "sunsetting" as they put it, in other words getting rid of all clients existing photo albums. They will all be deleted from June 30th.  These albums have taken people weeks and years to compile. Many users have 10000 or more photos all classified into ALBUMS.

From June 30th Dropbox will delete these albums and the current Timeline facility

Users are being given between now and the end of June to download all of the photos (thousands) from their albums, and re upload them where they will have to be uploaded again and saved into folders.

These new folders will use alot more DROPBOX space, because if a single photo is in multiple folders it will of course use alot more space than the previous solution

Effectively the photo section of DROPBOX is being dropped.

Dropbox are not even offering to migrate existing albums into folders but leaving their clients to deal with the ridiculous decision

I urge all people effected to post this onto your own Facebook pages and if you know any journalists or other forums, to make our voice heard.

[Sarah N.6]

I am checking Flickr which has a great way to build albums through their "organize" function - however not sure of their share function and collaboration - anyone else have any experience of this or other options.

[Simone C.9]

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@RichardDBX wrote:

Hi all,

Thank you all for the comments and questions about the upcoming changes to photos.dropbox.com. We understand this decision impacts the way you share and organize your photos, and we’d like to address a few points of confusion.

After June 30, the web Photos page will continue to be a place where you can view all of your photos across Dropbox folders, but will no longer contain the speed scroller functionality, or the ability to create, share, or modify albums and sets of multiple photos. All of your photos will remain safe in your Dropbox account, and there are still many ways for you to work with photos in Dropbox. The changes to this page do not impact the way you share and organize photos through Dropbox folders, shared folders, or shared links. 

The updated page (dropbox.com/photos) will display your photos as thumbnails. You will be able to sort your photos the same way you can sort photos on the photos.dropbox.com page today — by the creation date of the photo.

We apologize for the confusion around the changes to albums, and we’d like to provide some additional details:

• After June 30, you’ll no longer be able to create new albums, or make changes to existing albums on photos.dropbox.com.
• If you’ve shared an album or set of photos via a Dropbox shared link, those links will continue to work after June 30. You can access these links from the links page in order to view your photo albums.
• We’ve added additional tips and suggestions to our Help center article on how to recreate your albums as Dropbox folders, and how to use other Dropbox features to share and organize your photos.

There are no changes to photos you’ve shared, or will share in the future, through Dropbox shared folders or shared links. Any existing photos you’ve shared through these methods will not be impacted by the changes to photos.dropbox.com.

We recognize that this change may cause frustration. Thank you all for the feedback you’ve shared with us, and please keep it coming. We’ve communicated this feedback to our team and will use it to inform future Dropbox features.

Regards,

Richard

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WHO "accepted"  Richard at DROPBOX's "solution" so that this thread could be marked by DROPBOX as SOLVED?

[Simone C.9]

I've heard GOOGLE photos and Google Drive might be the way to go. 

[Igor V.1]

In other words, you're taking away the ONLY tool we had in Dropbox to organize photos.

Folders? Is that a joke? 

If at Dropbox you think folders are an appropriate way to organize ANYTHING, you are still living in the 20th century. 

Wake up before all your customers are gone, Dropbox. 

[bwraith]

I probably have more than 30000 photos on Dropbox. I found their barebones photo solution worked very well for my simple photo needs. They provided a way to group photos into albums and had a very easy way to share the photos. Also, their automatic uploading from the phone works well. 

OK, so now I have about 80 albums that were painstakingly assembled over years, sometimes from photos gathered from friends or from unusual photographic devices that did not conform to Dropbox's "creation date", so they are scattered throughout the timeline of my 30000 photos and very hard to track down on the timeline. The "missing date" section itself contains thousands of photos. The only way Dropbox has of finding these again in the album is to individually select every photo in an album and "see in folder", to find out where everything is again. My estimate is that to re-create my albums as folders will take something like 40 hours. Their interface also tends to hide even the filename, which if I could see in a list, might help me quite a bit to track them all down again. However, it seems I have to individually hunt each one down, as things stand.

Meanwhile, downloading and re-uploading, which has been mentioned in some posts, is also close to impractical. For one thing, many of the albums would require downloading more than 1GB, so I would be forced to carefully split the album up into separate downloads and then upload them. Here again, since the file names aren't visible, I would be trying to scroll back in the album view to the last photo previously downloaded, so I could select the next chunk of photos, not knowing if I will exceed the 1GB or not, requiring multiple attempts at downloading, to obtain a chunk less than 1GB. 

What bothers me is that Dropbox must be able to very easily implement a tool that would simply copy photos selected in the photo album view and provide a menu item (in the same place "download" is provided) to copy the selected items to a chosen folder. Obviously, you can download selected files, and they have copy implemented for selected files elsewhere, so how can this be so terribly difficult? Have they really separated the photo album view so completely that it would be impossible to provide a way to copy them to a folder on Dropbox?

Anyway, I suppose that yes, they must have created a situation where they can't offer a migration path back to their own file system.

At this point, all I can do is start rebuilding my albums. I will re-create a folder structure for my 80 albums. This does duplicate the location of the file in the system, but I don't know if perhaps Dropbox's de-duplication software would charge twice for the existence of an identical file in multiple locations. Perhaps not? That would be a very good question for Dropbox to answer, based on the many questions about Dropbox usage brought up regarding usage in their new directory-based method for doing photo albums.

I will be trying out flickr for albums and photos going forward, in answer to some questions from others about alternatives. I believe their albums and collections should provide the needed functionality for organizing. One very useful thing I discovered on flickr is that they provide a way to correct the "creation date", which in the past I couldn't find a good tool online to batch edit creation date (another missing tool in the photo functionality at Dropbox that would have saved me countless hours in the past). I will be trying "multcloud" to move the photos over, which will probably be a nightmare for 30000 plus photos on Dropbox, but I can't see continuing with photos in Dropbox, given how they've handled this situation.

I will definitely think twice about using Dropbox going forward, though it was my default method of storage for many years. I will increase my reliance on Google Drive and Flickr and see how that goes.

If any tools are discovered by others in trying to recover from this loss of photo functionality at Dropbox, I would be very interested.

[Simone C.9]

Thanks for your contribution to this page brwaith. It is quite incredible that DROPBOX are not replying (yet) to this new thread.

[cdysthe]

I have tried to use Google Photos and Drive. There's one problem that brought me back to Dropbox. There's an option to have your Google Photos pictures show up in a folder in Google Drive. They don't by default. I need that to be the case. However, that feature simply does not work. I spent a lot of time in the Google Photos/Drive forums and even on the phone with Google, but it still doesn't work. There's an endless thread regarding this on the Google forums. I went back to Dropbox because of that and now Dropbox is about to create their own mess. Where to next?

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[Simone C.9]

Please can everyone double post ie here but also in the new thread as this one is down as "solved" by DROPBOX and so no longer receiving attention:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Photos-and-videos/The-Photos-Page-is-Changing-Chapter-2-UNSOLVED/m-p...

[Rich]

I have merged the two threads and will merge any new ones that are created as well. Creating duplicate threads will not accomplish anything here. Every comment being posted to this thread is being reviewed by Dropbox. THIS is the thread that they are watching. Starting a second (or third, forth, etc.) conversation in a new thread will only mean that Dropbox does not see all of your comments.

It is very common in cases like this for Dropbox to not respond often but they DO read every post made to a thread that they are watching, and they are watching this one (confirmed by my contacts within Dropbox). Continuing the conversation on this thread is your best option for making sure that Dropbox understands how you feel.

Also, this thread is marked as Solved so that the Dropboxer's reply would be brought to the top of the thread for all to see, because everyone knows that most people don't bother reading the entire thread of a multi-page discussion.

Please keep the discussion going (I agree with all of you here!), but please keep it isolated to this thread. Any additional threads will be merged into this one with no further notice.

Thank you.