About Kenneth_l

@Heavypen and @comfort. Thanks for letting everyone know how you feel about this issue. I suspected it wasn't just me. I feel bad that your exceptionally high standards of quality and professionalism for what you do is lessened by the overall negative impression those forced Dropbox ads impose upon your clients. I hope you're both well and wish you good fortune. @Walter - Thanks for your replies. My following comments aren't in any way personal and are not meant to lessen the great positive experience I've enjoyed exploring the Dropbox service and community. I hope Ed, you and the rest of the Dropbox team are well and wish you good fortune.   To Dropbox Decision Makers When I posted this topic in 2016 I described those Dropbox Business ads as "not a deal breaker. But it's still annoying." That quickly escalated from annoying to an absolute deal breaker. I realized regardless of what individual Dropbox plan I had and no matter how expensive it was you'd still force feed me constant annoying Dropbox Business ads whenever I used your service. So I cancelled my Dropbox Pro membership in mid 2016. Yes, for that Business ads reason alone. I'm not kidding. Please let that sink in. It wasn't because of the price of your plans or the features (or lack thereof) you provided. You gave me the only reason I needed on a silver platter. There's no option to disable those annoying Business ads. In other words, decision makers at Dropbox, you lost me as a paying customer back in 2016 because I solved my problem without your dev team having to do a thing. I no longer had to put up with those insanely annoying Dropbox Business ads because I just stopped using Dropbox. Problem solved! Since then I seldom use my free Dropbox account. Once or twice I upgraded to Pro for a single month to complete a task and switched right back to free. Which means for just over two years the company lost between $250 to $400 I would have happily paid to keep using Dropbox Pro nonstop. The company will lose at least triple that amount over the next few years because I've no intention, whatsoever, on ever having a Dropbox paid account. In case you're still not getting the concept, you Dropbox Decision Makers, you're effectively treating your paid DB Plus and Pro paying customers exactly like the FREE version customers who are always getting ads to upgrade to a paid version. Your Dropbox Plus and Pro paying customers always get Business ads - no matter what. They're constantly reminded every time they access your website (to do anything) that instead of flying coach they should pay to upgrade to First Class. Instead of being a lowly individual they should be a business. Doesn't matter if most of those Business class features are useless to individuals, your website keeps hammering away at users every single darn time they access it to do anything. After encountering those Business ads so many times it becomes insulting. Insulting enough for me to cancel my DB Pro account and not bother putting up with it any longer. I'll enjoy getting on another airline that welcomes me to flying coach without going out of their way to mention they even have a First Class.  These are the airlines that are happy to have me paying to be on their flights in the first place.  Rather than the FREE equivalent of trying to be a stowaway. There's nothing wrong with every now and then sending out an email or other notice about Business features or sales, etc. Yet spamming that in the actual website interface when paying customers access it to do anything - that's annoying and for me a deal breaker. I'm curious, are you mass spamming Dropbox Plus and Pro ads to your Business accounts? You know, like do you pester the living daylights out of your Business account users just in case they may use or know someone who could use a Dropbox individual class account? Let me guess, that would be really annoying, right? They would already have the specific type of account that they want to use with Dropbox, right? Since they're already paying it would be easy for them to manage their account and change to a different type, right? It's still the start of the new year, 2019, and as I seldom use my free Dropbox account I figured to check in on things and noticed this topic. And apparently since my deal breaker still isn't fixed I saved myself suitable amounts of grief, time and money. Rather than waste the past 2 plus years hoping you would add the option to disable those annoying Business ads. Again, you don't have to fix it. I fixed it myself, which is best for me. Should you ever provide an option to disable Business ads maybe I'll care. I'm not waiting for it to happen. I only wonder how many DB Plus and Pro paying customer you have that feel the same way some of us do. And in that case, they're leaving when they've had enough, just like I did. If you simply added one option many of us would never have left. Just something to consider. ... View more

I'm not saying you should leave DP. DP has plenty of great features. Let's just say it can't hurt that while you're using DP you take an experimental test drive of OneDrive's method of organizing photos. There's a vast difference between how each service handles it. Please note I'm not so much advocating as merely a brief comparison for you to check out for yourself in more detail as you please. Similar to someone talking about a Mac or PC concerning how they deal differently with the same task/issue. Also please forgive me for making a long post. Not meant to be exhaustive. I just tend to write long posts lol. When you come across a folder in OneDrive, the first thing you'll notice is when in list view it outright tells you the total size of that folder. Which, besides the name of the folder immediately helps you narrow down where that small or large mass of photos you're looking for likely is. When you switch to grid view it will display all the folders with names near the bottom of each folder icon along with the total number of files/photos in each folder. Again, that's extremely helpful when narrowing down what files or photos you're looking for.  It goes without saying that the grid view is large enough to actually see what each thumbnail is. This is not merely using the "photos" section. This is simply looking at any particular folder in grid view. So, used together, as far as organizing photos go, even if I couldn't read the names of folders I can find out which ones have few or tons of files and photos in them within seconds, along with how large their folder is.  Once within the folder of photos you're looking for, you can sort by the following: name, date modified, date taken, size, ascending or descending for each of those previous sorting manners, and finally the holy grail of sorts lol: "rearrange" and "save sort order". That last part means I can click it, the browser refreshes for all photos in even larger size, then I can select one or more photos and simply drag and drop them anywhere along the grid. Which shuffles them around accordingly - save sort order - done. So for organizing, you can now take those 300 photos you want and in 5 seconds just click the small circle at the top right of each one you want then drag them all to the front, back, middle, anywhere in between, done. Then whenever you look at that folder that's the exact order those photos are going to be at til you change it. Smooth, right? That right there is what I call being able to organize your files/photos. All without using my previous method of batch renaming photos so they play nice with how I want to order them. Lastly, skipping plenty of other subtle details, there's a small text section like "caption" that you can place text associated with any file/photo. It lacks the power and flexibility of DP's commenting feature. So it doesn't let you post several comments on the same file/photo and allow others to do the same as you easily could using DP. In any case, what the OneDrive file/photo comments allow you to do is rather amazing. It lets you type some text and after a couple minutes that text is actually searchable.  Which for organizing is great for me. I can take a file or photo and write in the caption something like "mustdo" or "amazing" or whatever comes to mind, like a tag, and at a later time just click search and type in that word I'm looking for: up comes all the files and photos with that specific word/text in their caption. Smooth, right? I haven't tested it further. I certainly haven't dared to take my iPhoto or Photos app on my Mac and have it access either service - directly or otherwise. I'm still experimenting with baby steps lol. Apparently the service allows you to add tags but that's a learning battle for another day. Or another week or two if I can help it lol. Feel free to enjoy all the perks of DP and take a free test drive of OneDrive. You might end up still using DP or even using both. DP has many great features. Sadly, at least to me, organizing photos certainly isn't one of them.       ... View more

Thanks for sharing your workflow. I appreciate it. Yet naturally I do have a counter to that last part. By the way I define organizing the browser version of DP really doesn't do much of that at all. That is, other than merely placing all your photos one after another according to their date/name. For instance, when using the DP website and open up a folder with photos in them I'll see a long list with images smaller than an ant's eyelash. Okay, not that small but small enough to squint and guess what each thumbnail is supposed to be. You can't sort the contents of that folder/photos by any other category, such as size, etc. Nor can you narrow things down by using tags, search text by comments or description, or anything else. So out of some easy 300 photos I may have in one photo if I don't know, by name, what photo I'm already looking for the digital battle is already lost.  For DP albums, I can't rearrange any of my photos to be in front of any other. It forces me to keep them in the same date order as before. I also can't pick or change the cover photo of an album. How do I get around this? I use a third party batch renaming app to rename hundreds or thousands of photos all at once. That way they'll always be in the order I prefer them to be in. Naturally, that's whenever I try to use DP photos in that way. Unless you're using some new version of the DP website I'm not able to really organize anything regarding DP photos. ... View more

My pleasure to offer a workaround as the others did. I know it doesn't actually provide a real solid solution. I share your pain. As for the basic functionality requiring extra effort and workarounds I also agree with you. For the most part, at least for now, I just put up with it. ... View more

I hear you, Brad. It seems there isn't a direct built-in Dropbox feature for it right now. If there is I'm happy for someone to point out what I'm missing. As for a work around, if you're using a Mac I humbly suggest my solution: Name Mangler. If you're using Windows (or just don't like Name Mangler) then a third party batch naming software should do the trick. Then you could upload all the photos you want accordingly from each device you use. Then, once at the desktop, drag and drop whatever photos you want into the renaming program and it will sequence and/or rename them accordingly. For me it takes seconds to rename hundreds/thousands of photos that keeps me relatively sane. Yes, not the same as a great built-in feature of Dropbox but right now it's my work around. Hope this helps.   ... View more

Thanks, Rich R! I also submitted a support ticket along with a link to this topic, as suggested. I appreciate your help. ... View more