Hi Tom,
I had over 80 albums, some with over 1000 photos and videos, spread over many different directories. Also, my timeline in Dropbox Photos (the feature going away), has something like 40000 photos, I think. Many of the photos aren't in the proper place on the timeline, sometimes in "missing dates", which itself has thousands of photos in more or less random order, but also sometimes in actually totally wrong dates. This is because many of my devices don't seem to honor whatever date of creation Dropbox looks at. Or, in some cases, the photos were sent to me from people who did not set the time right on their device. Or, in some cases, I failed to set the time correctly by accident. Anyway, the result is that you are absolutely right, it is very difficult to go find all the individual photos in an album in many cases.
I thought a simple but bandwidth intensive method would be to download the photos from the album page by selecting all, then downloading them, then uploading them. That can work well, but only if you have less than 1GB of photos and videos in the album. Otherwise, Dropbox will refuse to allow a download greater than 1GB.
In the end, I had to tailor my strategy to each album, going through and finding some of the bigger videos (using "show in folder" feature in the album page to take me to the video in the dropbox files area) and copying them individually to a new directory. I generally made a copy of the album first, so that I could go through and delete each item from the copied album after copying that item to the new folder where the album is being recreated in Dropbox's file system. I then could probably download and upload most or all the photos in one shot, once the individual large videos had been moved.
The process was very time-consuming in my case. It took me about 15-20 hours, which is less than I had estimated (perhaps more like 40 hours is what I had guessed), but it did take a good long time.
I am still wondering why Dropbox couldn't at least provide a "copy to Dropbox folder" function in their album area. I believe this would alleviate many of us with a large investment in albums and photo features in Dropbox.
Also, I am not sure about this at all and would much appreciate a Dropbox employee making a definitive statement, but I believe that if you create multiple copies of a file in different directories, as long as you don't modify them in any way, the extra copies may not count against your quota. I believe Dropbox chunks its files into 4MB chunks, and if other files have the same exact chunks, they won't increase your space usage. I don't know if this is true, but I thought I read that somewhere. Anyway, if Dropbox could comment on that, it might alleviate some of the concerns about big data usage increases from having multiple albums with same pictures implemented as folders in Dropbox, which I've read here and there.
Meanwhile, I plan to continue to use Dropbox for storage of my photos. I may even construct albums as folders in many cases going forward. However, I think that the message Dropbox has sent is that we should use photo-specialized sites for things like albums and photo sharing, and use Dropbox only for storage as their focus. I am therefore using flickr for now. I have discovered that multcloud will allow me to transfer via the cloud (and it is quite fast if you use their premium service) from Dropbox to Flickr albums. It is very finnicky, but if you set up your multcloud properly, you can copy (very lightly tested at this point, but did transfer an album with 400 photos and videos successfully as well as a few more small ones, so read with huge grain of salt) an entire folder in Dropbox (containing only photos and videos) into Flickr's album subdirectory on multcloud. This seems to have created an album in Flickr with the same content. This seems promising to me. Flickr should be very good for photo sharing functionality and has a number of useful editing and management tools. One that I really found useful is a batch way of changing the "creation date", which should alleviate some of my worst problems with devices that put wrong dates on photos and videos.
I hope you find this useful. I am done converting my albums in Dropbox to folders after 15-20 hours. From here on out, I'll still keep the photos and videos in Dropbox and often create folders that are essentially "albums" in Dropbox. However, I will most likely immediately transfer the folders or the photos and videos to Flickr to implement any further sharing and organization into additional albums or "collections" or whatever on Flickr. Sigh.
