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Forum Discussion

mattc--9's avatar
mattc--9
Helpful | Level 6
16 days ago

Improve Photos.dropbox.com performance

I love that Dropbox is platform agnostic. I don't want to rely on Google or Microsoft. But Photos.dropbox.com needs serious improvement or I will not be renewing my subscription next year. Photos is the #1 thing I store in Dropbox. Even ignoring how many more features Google Photos has, just loading in the photo grid in dropbox feels slow and unresponsive. If you could make it so that I could load in Dropbox photos and quickly get to a photo I know I have from a year or two ago, I would be happy.

 

Could you do more caching of lower quality thumbnails? Maybe that is why scrolling feels so unresponsive. The count and dates of photos are clearly not cached or precomputed, because when I load the page, it takes a minute for the date scrollbar to fully load all the months I have photos from. Even if you could just do this for Camera Roll, that would be amazing.

 

 

  • Walter's avatar
    Walter
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hi there mattc--9 - thanks for bringing this to our attention.

     

    Just to make sure we've logged this right, could you clarify which web browser you're using and let us know more about what exactly you had in mind?

     

    Have you tried clearing your browser's cache and using another browser or an incognito window with no extensions or plugins running to see if there's an improvement?

     

    Let us know more and we'll take it from there, Matt.

    • Dave111's avatar
      Dave111
      Explorer | Level 3

      mattc--9 Walter 
      It's a ongoing Dropbox issue with numerous complaints ... example and Dropbox Engineering response below ...

      "The engineers have informed me that a resolution for the indexing issue may come at a later date. However, they don't have an exact timeline to provide at this moment.
       
      If you have any other questions, please let me know." 
       
      Website Photos view is slow - The Dropbox Community

  • mattc--9's avatar
    mattc--9
    Helpful | Level 6

     

    Hello  - the issue linked by Dave perfectly sums up the issue. Its clearly an indexing issue for the web browser. But I also would like to mention it occurs in the mobile app for me as well. 

    The mobile app should show thumbnails while scrolling. How can I see where I am in my photo gallery if I cannot see the photos? Also it takes forever to load the previews.

    link removed

    For the web I usually use firefox with extensions. But I tested it logging onto chrome with no extensions. Same issue. it takes forever to load in photos and not even all months load at once. I am not going to post a video for right now of the web because its too hard not to leak personal information.

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