You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
The Photos page is changing...
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 re...
Hi everyone,
Thanks again for your continued feedback on our upcoming changes.
I wanted to let you know that we've heard your concerns about how difficult it is to preserve your album structures in Dropbox. Our engineers have created a simple album export tool to help make this process easier. It's available starting today at the following URL:
www.dropbox.com/photos/album_download
The tool will allow you to download your albums to your desktop as .zip files. Please note that you'll be downloading a new copy of your photos, not moving them, so the photos will still exist in your Dropbox in the original location you saved them.We hope this tool will help alleviate some of the frustration that some of you have reported in this thread. If you have any problems using the tool, feel free to contact us via www.dropbox.com/support.
Regards,
Richard
RichardDBX
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffRichardDBXDropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi everyone,
Thanks again for your continued feedback on our upcoming changes.
I wanted to let you know that we've heard your concerns about how difficult it is to preserve your album structures in Dropbox. Our engineers have created a simple album export tool to help make this process easier. It's available starting today at the following URL:
www.dropbox.com/photos/album_download
The tool will allow you to download your albums to your desktop as .zip files. Please note that you'll be downloading a new copy of your photos, not moving them, so the photos will still exist in your Dropbox in the original location you saved them.
We hope this tool will help alleviate some of the frustration that some of you have reported in this thread. If you have any problems using the tool, feel free to contact us via www.dropbox.com/support.
Regards,
Richard
If I had the space and/or the inclination to download all my photos to my computer (to preserve my Albums), I wouldn't need Dropbox, now would I?!! I'm so glad I spent HOURS sifting through my camera uploads and organizing them into albums so I could find what I wanted down the line -- aaaaarrrghh! :-(
- Rich
Super User II
Thanks, RichardDBX. Very helpful and much appreciated!
Oh please. Silly and toxic DB.
- Chiming in to voice my extreme frustration with this ridiculous feature takeaway. As a paying Dropbox user, the loss of albums is a deal killer for me. This just hit my radar, one week ahead of the 7/17 decimation of albums, and only because I logged on to my desktop.
There has been zero notification on my Android app.
I spent the last several hours following their ridiculously cumbersome workaround - download dozens of albums (with tens of thousands of pictures) so you can upload them again as folders - brilliant change management Dropbox product managers #sarcasm.
To no surprise my computer disc is now full, as someone previously posted, if I had that much space on my computer why would I need Dropbox?
Horrible customer service Dropbox. This is simply unacceptable.
Like many of you, I'm looking for alternatives now. Happy to take my loyalty and my money elsewhere and tell anyone I know that Dropbox is to be avoided for business and personal needs, because they cannot be trusted to manage feaures appropriately or keep the customer's needs as a top priority. I am here to share my ultimate frustration with this new photo page update. You have effectively deleted the entire reason that I signed up for Dropbox. I use it for my business primarily which is interior design. My photos are automatically uploaded and then I organized them into folders according to my jobs. I used these with my clients to view the rooms we are working on, and can share the folders with them as we work. We also used it to easily share hundreds of photos with our website design team. Up until now, it has been a very powerful tool.
Now, that you have deleted all of my albums, and only show a screen of tiny thumbnails (with no ability to make them large enough to view), I have lost several hundred hours of time and money. Your "solution" of downloading each of my albums to a zip file onto my computer is worthless. Why even use dropbox if I can't easily access my photos? If I wanted to download all my photos to my computer, I would just sync with my phone.
If Dropbox does not allow me to regain access to my photos other than useless little thumbnails in no particuliar order, then I will need to find an alternative cloud source. What a shame. Until now, I have recommended Dropbox to everyone I know.
- Rich
JunHill850B wrote:
My photos are automatically uploaded and then I organized them into folders according to my jobs.
Which you can still do.
I used these with my clients to view the rooms we are working on, and can share the folders with them as we work. We also used it to easily share hundreds of photos with our website design team.The folders you place your photos in can still be shared.
... and only show a screen of tiny thumbnails (with no ability to make them large enough to view)Change the display from list view to grid view.
Grid View in a shared folderGrid View in your own account
- Came back to see if they had pulled the trigger yet, and they sure have. The new Photos 'app'/page is completely useless. Its an unresponsive turd with 0 functionality. Why even bother having it? I'm very much vindicated in cancelling my Dropbox subscription now.
"https://www.cultofmac.com/216665/a-tour-of-dropboxs-amazing-new-albums-feature/" << They should do a follow up.
I hear a lot of people talking about Dropbox focusing on tacking the Enterprise market, they've got no chance. Every enterprise worth knowing about is getting storage services from MS, Google, etc. It comes built into other software offerings. Why pay for Dropbox when you are already spending money that offer the same service with much more already?
Dropbox differentiated itself from its competitors by having a better product...now, well now they have nothing worth knowing about. I will sit back eating popcorn over the next few years and watch Dropbox circle the drain on its way to complete obscurity.
Richard - you say "The tool will allow you to download your albums to your desktop as .zip files. Please note that you'll be downloading a new copy of your photos, not moving them, so the photos will still exist in your Dropbox in the original location you saved them." but don't mention that we then have to go and delete all these original photos (thousands!) to avoid duplication and storage issues. This is a terrible change.
The tool that zips albums is a simple loop over the selected album that adds all of the pictures to a zip file. It doesn't touch the original files because they could be in multiple albums. It's a half-assed fix for a self-inflicted stupid problem in an attempt to pacify us with very little effort which will be useless to anyone who added the same pictures to more than one album. Of course, it can still help you keep your pictures organized, but it will duplicate all of them because the tags/metadata are in Dropbox's database, not your pictures. What would be actually useful is a SQL dump so we could keep the album structures alongside a single copy of the associated files.
I'm in the process of migrating all of my data to Onedrive for Business. I'm not sure if I'll keep it there, but I'm definitely done with Dropbox and that's as far as I've gotten for now. It took work to remove all of the features we're discussing, which means they must be positioning themselves to either annoy us intentionally, which I would believe at this point, or make room for other services and addons. I have no interest in paying more to get something I already had and the manner in which this change was implemented was incredibly stupid and poor on their part, so I'm out regardless. I would have been much more willing to stick around had they bothered to communicate the changes in a way that didn't cause anxiety and confusion.
Qbis,
Exactly my sentiments.
Disgusting.
IBH
The changes made to remove the photo albums and sharing capability in the Dropbox web site are a massive step backward in your service. I have been a paying Dropbox customer for many years, and the photo album sharing capability was one of the defining features that made me choose your service over other competitors.
As an IT professional myself, I read your explaination of the reasons of why the sharing capability was removed as "Our devops guys couldn't figure out how / didn't want to make this work at scale, so we are essentially giving up and removing the feature... Sorry 'bout that - have a zip tool!". The person/group at Dropbox that made the decision to pull album sharing are going to cost the company a lot of loyal paying customers in the long run.
It is unfortunate, but I am seriously re-evaluating whether or not I will continue to use your service, or go elsewhere for my cloud storage. I will gladly pay a few dollars more each year to another provider to have the ability to quickly and efficiently share photos and videos from my cloud storage. I don't pay for a cloud service to have that provider summarily remove an existing capability and replace it with a stop-gap, inefficient measure down the road because, well... just because.
- Totally agree. This is the worse change to a service I've ever come across in my 40 years of using computers.
I like to grab and pull photos to drop into an email, not sharing a link but actually bringing the image directly in. Is this no longer available? It was important to me the ease that the recipient of my emails could view photos without having to open each one. Is this no longer available?
Barbara
I have been trying to download my albums for over an hour now... not happening
I have spent hours organising my photos into albums, looks like I have lost everything
The only reason I upgraded my db was to keep my photos safe and off my PC and be able to organise them easily,
what a joke
Will be cancelling both business and personal accounts
help! what are alternatives to dropbox for photos - storage, sharing and now updloading to social media. I've read lots of comments saying 'bye bye' dropbox, but where to go?
I just tried to send this message to "Support" -- there being no indication that the message got sent or received, I'm repeating it here.
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This is change is a terrible business decision and it comes close to being an all-time B-School case study in customer-losing PR.
You are presenting a major elimination in usefulness as though it is part of a process to make improvements. Your paying customers are not morons and you simply add insult to injury by talking down. Stop the corporate BS, and reverse course. You've made a major mistake that will cost you a lot of paying users (for me, that's $13.95 / month, $167.40 / year). I think the revenue per user here far exceeds the incremental cost.
I need alternatives. Can you recommend any good ones? Does anyone actually own the software you've been using for the album functionality?
Awaiting your response . . .
