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Forum Discussion
Camera Upload Not Syncing New Photos on Iphone
I have Dropbox installed on my computer, and when I plug in my phone I get the message, "No new images or videos were found on Ashley's iPhone" when in fact there are lots of new images and videos for Dropbox to add to my Camera Upload folder. All my settings are correct on my computer to take the files from my phone and add them to Dropbox, I have enough room in my Dropbox account, I can't seem to figure out why it just hasn't downloaded any new images since March.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks, Ashley
Hello everyone,
In order to fix Camera Uploads for your devices please make sure you have tried the following:
1) Install the latest Dropbox app on your device.
2) Enable / Reset Camera Uploads on your computer
Mac
- Click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar at the top of the screen and then click on the gear in the Notifications panel
- Choose "Preferences".
- Go to the "Import" tab.
- Uncheck and check again "Enable camera uploads for".
Windows
- Click the Dropbox icon in the system tray at the bottom right of your screen and then click on the gear in the Notifications panel.
- Select "Preferences".
- In the window that appears, click on "Change AutoPlay Settings".
- In the AutoPlay settings, scroll down and choose the camera you want to change settings for. It will likely have "Import pictures and video using Dropbox" as the default.
- Click on the drop-down menu and choose "Ask me every time" or choose a different application for importing.
This will reset your Camera Uploads settings for all your devices. When you connect a device, Dropbox will ask you if you want to import pictures from it.
Note:
- Android devices: Select Connect as a Disk Drive from the status bar
- iOS devices: Unlock the device to allow camera uploads to continue
3) Enable / Reset Camera Uploads on your mobile device
iOS
- Open the Dropbox app, go to the “Recents” tab and tap the gear icon
- Under the Settings heading, select Camera Uploads
- You can enable or disable the automatic camera uploads feature, as well as the option to allow the feature to use cellular data or not. Please note that videos will not be automatically uploaded over cellular data.Android
- Open the Dropbox app
- Tap on the menu button
- Tap the gear icon
- Under Camera Upload, select “Turn on Camera Upload"You can also read more about the camera uploads feature on the following page: https://help.dropbox.com/photos-videos/camera-uploads-overview
If you experience issues with the Camera Uploads feature, so that our support team can investigate more on this, please go to www.dropbox.com/support and submit a ticket request.
Thank you!
Here is the email I received from Dropbox support:
Thanks for contacting Dropbox! Sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue with your Camera Uploads.
If uploads from the Dropbox app appear stuck or slow, we’d recommend that you first try to reinstall our app, which will cancel the sync and clear the upload queue. When you sign in again, you can once again attempt to upload these files using our Camera Upload feature. Please note that if you have any favorited items, you will have to once again favorite and download any files that you’d previously favorited after reinstalling the app.
You can follow these steps to sign out and reinstall the app:
1. Open the Dropbox app, and select Settings
2. Under the Settings heading, disable the Camera Upload feature
3. Sign out of your Personal Dropbox account
4. Delete the Dropbox app from your device
5. From the App Store, download the latest version of the Dropbox app
6. After Dropbox has finished downloading, open the app and sign back into your Dropbox accountAfter following these steps, the upload queue will be cleared, and you can turn Camera Upload back on.
If this fails to resolve your issue -
1) You can try Dropbox's Carousel app (free in the App Store), as we've optimized the Camera Upload feature for that app. Automatic Backup from Carousel will still go into the Camera Uploads folder in your Dropbox.
2) You can plug your device into a computer to quickly upload remaining items.
To enable Camera Upload from the desktop client, please follow these steps:
- Make sure you have the most recent version of the desktop client installed. You can download it here: https://dropbox.com/install
- Click the small Dropbox icon in your menu bar/system tray.
- Click the gear in the Notifications pane.
- Select Preferences and click on the “import” tab.
- Check the box that says “Enable camera uploads.” You can set it to upload only photos, or both photos and videos.Finally, it's important to note that if you're uploading a large queue of items or long videos, you'll likely want to make sure background uploading is enabled.
In order to enable background uploading for the Camera Upload feature, the app needs permission to access your device's location services and does not collect your location information.
With background uploading enabled, the app will automatically resume unfinished uploads when it detects a change to a location that you have previously uploaded to with Camera Upload (Wi-Fi only). If uploading using cellular data is enabled, the app will resume when a significant location change is detected.
This feature is designed to make Camera Upload work more efficiently and uses a low-power option provided by Apple.
In order for the Dropbox mobile app to resume uploads in the background of the device, a change in location must be detected from where the device was previously uploading from using Camera Uploads. The location change is necessary to trigger the Background App Refresh feature to resume the Dropbox mobile app in the background. This change does not need to be as significant when connected to a WiFi network. When using cellular data, the change in location will likely need to be more significant in order to be detected by Location Services.
For more information, please see our Help Center article here:
https://help.dropbox.com/mobile/location-data
I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.
- Wow. Just follow those million easy steps. Dumb. Dropbox support: I use Dropobox camera uploads as my primary back up for photos. It has been working seamlessly for the past few YEARS then all of the sudden I'm getting this error. Please look into this matter and resolve it. We pay for this service.
I've tried literally everything suggested here in this forum (which isn't much, for the record) and nothing has worked. I have loads of space left in Dropbox that I've paid for, and really need to be able to access the photos on my iPhone 6 from Dropbox on my desktop. After working consistently for years, I've been able to sync NOTHING since the middle of November.
Help!?
- That FINALLY worked for me! THANK YOU!!!
This seems excessive to me and I dislike having to delete, reinstall and sync with gigbytes of data in Dropbox.
Here is what worked for me:
- Disconnect iPhone.
- Turn off Enable camera uploads in Dropbox preferences.
- Run the following tasks in MainMenu (if you do not have the app, you can get it here: http://mainmenuapp.com.). I am not sure which one may have fixed the issue or that you need to run them all. Nonetheless, I thought I would share all that I did pretty much in the order that I did them.
- Clean User Cash
- Remove Corrupt Preferences
- Flush DNS Cache (probably not necessary).
- Clean All Logs
- Clean Archived Logs
- All Maintenance
- Clean Font Cache (weidly this fixed a lot of weird bugs in the past so I ran it).
- This one will force a restart.
- Turn on Enable camera upload.
- Connect iPhone.
This worked for me. I am not affiliated with MainMenu in any way.
- Zed
Dropbox Staff
Hello everyone,
In order to fix Camera Uploads for your devices please make sure you have tried the following:
1) Install the latest Dropbox app on your device.
2) Enable / Reset Camera Uploads on your computer
Mac
- Click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar at the top of the screen and then click on the gear in the Notifications panel
- Choose "Preferences".
- Go to the "Import" tab.
- Uncheck and check again "Enable camera uploads for".
Windows
- Click the Dropbox icon in the system tray at the bottom right of your screen and then click on the gear in the Notifications panel.
- Select "Preferences".
- In the window that appears, click on "Change AutoPlay Settings".
- In the AutoPlay settings, scroll down and choose the camera you want to change settings for. It will likely have "Import pictures and video using Dropbox" as the default.
- Click on the drop-down menu and choose "Ask me every time" or choose a different application for importing.
This will reset your Camera Uploads settings for all your devices. When you connect a device, Dropbox will ask you if you want to import pictures from it.
Note:
- Android devices: Select Connect as a Disk Drive from the status bar
- iOS devices: Unlock the device to allow camera uploads to continue
3) Enable / Reset Camera Uploads on your mobile device
iOS
- Open the Dropbox app, go to the “Recents” tab and tap the gear icon
- Under the Settings heading, select Camera Uploads
- You can enable or disable the automatic camera uploads feature, as well as the option to allow the feature to use cellular data or not. Please note that videos will not be automatically uploaded over cellular data.Android
- Open the Dropbox app
- Tap on the menu button
- Tap the gear icon
- Under Camera Upload, select “Turn on Camera Upload"You can also read more about the camera uploads feature on the following page: https://help.dropbox.com/photos-videos/camera-uploads-overview
If you experience issues with the Camera Uploads feature, so that our support team can investigate more on this, please go to www.dropbox.com/support and submit a ticket request.
Thank you!Hi there thanks for the article, which although I tried to follow it has not solved my problem. I am too busy to have to plug my iphone into my computer and I just want my camera uploads folder (photos and videos) to appear in my same account camera uploads folder on my PC. However, I keep forgetting how to get it to do this. The do appear there sometimes, but today I've made an 8 min video which I want to edit on my PC, but I can't get it. I've wasted hours and hours trying to get it off my phone onto my computer. Nothing I do will work - it's very VERY frustrating. When I tried to follow your instructions, it tells me to 'Connect a personal Dropbox' and then it won't let me connect my own dropbox to my own dropbox. I must have let it upgrade to business at some stage but then backed out when I found out how much it would cost me. Cannot afford it. Just trying to get videos.... off my phone... onto my computer. Sooooo frustrated.
I have done this many times and each time I connect my iphone via usb to my macbook, nothing happens. So I have to go through this everytime I plug it in.
- Unfortunately, this did not help.
I use the latest version of dropbox
Here's an alternative approach for iPhone users:
This Dropbox Camera Uploads feature has been broken for so long that I just bypass it now on my iPhone.
Instead, I use the "Image Capture" app that's built into the Mac. Connect your iPhone via USB and it shows all the photos on your phone. Then just drag the ones you want into the Dropbox Camera Uploads folder.
A bit of a pain compared to if proper Dropbox syncing was working, but it works, and it's pretty easy.
In case anybody is wondering, as an iPhone user this is the best solution I've found thus far. Thanks IanHowlett!
Same issue here. I thought Dropbox was automatically uploading my photos. Today I looked carefully and found many many photos on my phone have never been uploaded to my pc. Now I am trying to find out how to do this manually with no luck.
And as if by magic I turned backup on and off again (having done so a few times in the past) and its working!
My fix to this issue was simple: go to DROPBOX APP on my iPhone and simply turn ON the “camera upload” feature again.
It was turned OFF (without me having done/changed it - must have been after some update of the dropbox app…).
This is still not working as it should for me... (even though it's set to ON again on my iPhone)
But, at least there is ONE OTHER TEMP FIX I found:
going into Dropbox DESKTOP and PREFERENCES and then IMPORT: unchecking and re-checking again “ENABLE CAMERA UPLOADS for PHOTOS & VIDEOS” (while having my iPhone connected to laptop via USB) caused stuff to sync to desktop again and import (at least in that moment…)
Hey, dropbox, please fix this, or advise what we are all missing here. Thank you in advance!
I got this response from Dropbox support. Not helpful, pointing the finger at Apple. Also, no link to the ticket that they claim to have filed.
Marley, Feb 27, 11:53 AM PST:
I had the same issue. I guess after updating the db app on my iphone camera uploads was deactivated for whatever reason… turning on camera uploads in the app settings again immediately solved the problem!
You don't think maybe Apple is mad we're not using iCloud, and added some sneaky **bleep** into their latest iOS updates just to screw with Dropbox, do you? I know that sounds paranoid, but I wouldn't put it past the three ring circus that is post-Jobs Apple.
Either way, the Camera Uploads function has gone way downhill since they did away with Carousel. I loved that app, I have absolutely no idea why they got rid of it.
Wow, that was it for me too! I definitely DID NOT turn off Camera Upload either.
Thanks for pointing that out!
Hi Ashley,
Thanks for posting your question on our forum.
Are you still having the same issues? Could I suggest installing Carousel on your iPhone. This application let's you automatically upload your photos to your Dropbox right after you've taken the photo. For more information on Carousel please take a look at: carousel.dropbox.comCarousel used to be good at uploading
Now no matter if I move location or not I have to constantly open the Dropbox app on my phone and prod it into action
i have location services enabled and background loading also set
it almost looks like background loading is not working
it was very annoying when I travelled a couple of years ago because I wanted my photos to upload overnight while we had wifi
- I followed all the instructions on this page: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-installs-integrations/Camera-Upload-Not-Syncing-New-Photos-on-Iphone/td-p/118856
All settings are set up. Battery is full. App and iOS versions are most updated.
Since yesterday it “looking for photos” not starting to upload them one by one... I tried to restart the app, restart my phone. Nothing helped.
Can someone please help?- I have exactly the same issue
- I couldn’t find a way to answer Megan to my previous post, so I’m creating a new question on this- same problem, more data:
My iPhone photos stopped syncing to Dropbox. It’s missing around ~1000 photos from last month or two, which weren’t uploaded. It usually syncs every time I open Dropbox app, but this time it got stuck with the message “looking for photos...”. It’s been like that for 4 days. I followed all your steps. Uninstalled and reinstalled Dropbox on my phone. Have the most updated version of both iOS and Dropbox. All settings are configured properly. It doesn’t work in either wifi or cellular data. The same message keeps showing up “looking for photos...” and nothing happens. The last photo that was backed up is from 9 days ago ( but still missing photos and videos from before that).
Same issue with no photo uploads since ios 8.4 update on my iphone:-( "Can't connect to Dropbox". Already tried to delete and reinstall dropbox app....frustrating I can't find an answer anywhere. I did not like the reviews for Carousel...any other fixes?
just turn on dropbox on your phone
- Also Dbox discontinued Carousel. Right?
Hi Sebbo,
Thank you for your reply. We've confirmed that this is a known issue on Apple's end and we've filed a ticket with them to help investigate this issue.
Unfortunately, we don't have an ETA for when this issue will be resolved, but as soon as we have any updates, we'll be sure to reach out to you.
Thank you again for your patience, and sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.
In the meantime I'd suggest you to upload the missing pictures using the app on your phone.