Dropbox app not seeing all photos on my iPhone

[Shirley N.]

When I use the Dropbox iOS app to upload photos, the app is not seeing all of my photos. For example, I have 3000+ photos in my "All Photos" album, and Dropbox is only seeing 255 of them. I double checked and know that the missing photos are not the "thumbnailed" ones already uploaded to iCloud Photo Library. Dropbox isn't even seeing the full resolution originals that are on my phone.

iPhone 5s
iOS 8.3
Dropbox app version 3.9.3

[Nicole V.10]

Hi, I'm having the same issue. However my MacBook Air (2015 model) is also failing to see all of the photos on my iPhone (6000+) and only showing the last 127!? I'd really appreciate any ideas?

[marcus n.5]

so the first post was made July 06, 2015 04:56, and still no solution..?

Im also having this issue where im trying to manually upload some photos from camera roll (the all photos album) and not seeing many of them.

i have about 2k photos, but only about 1k of them are actually on the phone (the rest of them are in icloud). when in the dropbox app it only shows 175 of them.

in my case the problem occured after i upgraded to the latest version of ios on my Iphone.

[Jeff B.48]

STILL no resolution. I'm having same issue with photos on iPad.  The Dropbox app only sees a subset of my photoroll photos. THIS IS USELESS AND UNACCEPTABLE!

[kelly k.13]

I am experiencing the same problem. Very annoying and no clue what to do.

[Ryan K.5]

Same problem. The Dropbox app sees only 65 of the photos on my iPhone (I have several thousand). It's not even the most recent 65. I want to upload a video I have on my phone from three weeks ago and it's not showing, so I can't upload to Dropbox. Won't get a response on here. App deleted. Useless. 

[John M.232]

Same issue here with a work colleague, he has a photo on his phone that I want but when he goes to his app it is only showing 20 photos on his phone.

Come on Dropbox please reply to this thread.

[Rob F.13]

Hi, I had this issue and found "kind of" a work around. 

I had 220 pictures I wanted to upload to Dropbox but it only displayed the last 2 I had taken. I tried creating a new folder and moving them into that but I still had the same issue. 

The issue seems to be with the phone and not Dropbox as I received the same issue with Google Drive. 

In the end I bit the bullet and email them to myself. I have Office 365 so sending them in large quantities isn't really an issue for me. I highlighted the album I wanted and selected "Email". My iPhone then prepares then images to send in an email with a small loading circle, needless to say this took and while and once it finished it crashed and didn't actually attached the images. 

I checked both Google Drive and Dropbox one more time before resorting to plugging in my phone and manually finding and copying the pictures. Both Google Drive and Dropbox could be see the pictures. 

The issue seems to lie with the iPhone not Google Drive or Dropbox, the loading circle which my iPhone performed seemed to index the pictures making them now view-able in all apps which were not present before. 

I hope this helps some people out. My case only involved just over 200 pictures, this isn't a feasible work around for thousands of pictures, although you could probably do them at 200-300 at a time?

In short:

Highlight the pictures you want

Send to email

Let it prepare the pictures

Wait for it to open the new email

Close the email

Open Dropbox and attempt the upload.

It worked for me anyway.

- Rob

[Rebecca R.2]

This was driving me crazy too--and I figured out the problem! Way too excited about this.  It's not a glitch at all.  It's simply that the photos stored in the cloud, and not in full res on your iphone, do not show up as options to transfer to dropbox. 

To test this, go into your photos app and select one of the photos not showing up in dropbox.  Click enhance, then watch the photo download.  Now go to dropbox, and guess what..it should now be there, available for upload.

To solve this, you can either open Photos under Settings, and select "Download and Keep Originals", instead of "Optimize Phone Storage."  If you have thousands of photos like I do, and don't have room to do that on your phone, you can just go through your photos and individually download them from the cloud in your photos app.

Hope this helps!

[ElPoonPoon · Accepted solution]

For anyone having this problem still. It seems as though the photos are not naturally in your list if you use the tabs at the bottom of the app, however if you select the '+' icon that's hovering in the middle of those tabs and go 'Upload Photos' you should be able to see them all through that. Worked for my boss on his iPhone 6 with some version of iOS 10...

[This thread is now closed by moderators due to inactivity. If you're experiencing a similar behavior, feel free to start a new discussion in the Dropbox Community here.]