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Forum Discussion
Uploading photos from phone
I basically got Dropbox in order to move my enormous collection of pictures and videos from my iPhone to somewhere else...The transfer went fine for a while, but then it has stopped and I keep seeing...
Hi there,
If you are using the Camera Uploads feature , please first check that these requirements are met:
- You have a strong WiFi connection
- Your device has sufficient battery life available (camera uploads will pause when battery life is low)
- If you have a free Dropbox account, you have connected your computer to your personal Dropbox account, you have upgraded your personal account to Dropbox Pro
For iOS users:
Background uploading
Background uploading allows camera uploads to finish adding photos to your Dropbox, even if you didn't open the Dropbox app. To enable:
- Open the Dropbox app.
- Open the Settings menu.
- Scroll to the Camera Upload section.
- Toggle Background Uploading to On.
Notes on background uploading: Normally, camera uploads only runs while the Dropbox app is open and for a few minutes after you close it. This is due to a limitation in iOS. However, if you turn on background uploading, the app will automatically resume uploads whenever it detects a significant change in your iPhone's location.
For Android users:
Once camera uploads is enabled, the following things happen:
- Dropbox automatically adds eligible photos and videos to the Camera Uploads folder in your Dropbox
- When you launch Dropbox from your phone or tablet, the Dropbox app adds any photos or videos taken since the last time the app was open, or the last time the app was connected to your computer
Note: Camera uploads will only upload photos that are located in the Camera or Screenshots folders of your device's photo or gallery app. If your photos are not in this app then they will not be uploaded to Dropbox.
When you choose Wi-Fi only for Camera Uploads, background uploading will not use your cellular data and will resume when your device connects to a Wi-Fi network again.
Once you have checked all of the above and still are experiencing issues with your uploads, as a first step try signing out and then back in to the app. If that doesn't solve the issue, please remove and reinstall the Dropbox app on your mobile device:
https://www.dropbox.com/mobile
If you keep having issues even after reinstalling the app, so that our support team can investigate and assist you on this, please go to www.dropbox.com/support and submit a ticket request.
Once you do, please let us know with the ticket number ID you will receive in your mail and we'll be happy to help!
Thank you.
Same on my phone, and it turned out that it was getting stuck on a corrupted picture. It would half upload a particular photo then stop. I went and found the offending picture in my gallery app, and it crashed the app too. Deleted the pic and all is well... Hope that helps.
I'm running Android N (7.0) on a Nexus 5X, and I also frequently run into this "Waiting to Upload" problem in the Camera Upload interface. I've turned on and off WiFi, logged in and out of Dropbox, and usually after 20-30 minutes of fiddling around with various things, I'm able to coax the Dropbox android app into uploading photos.
This is the first time I haven't been able to randomly solve things by restarting the app / phone / connection a bunch.
SUGGESTION: It would be nice if the reason for the "Waiting for upload..." message were exposed to the end user. For example: "Waiting for WiFi connection" or "Waiting until battery is charged" or "Waiting (stuck on photo #820 for 87 minutes now)" instead of the all-purpose uninformative message we currently get.
I was able to solve my camera upload issue on Android by completely deleting the Dropbox app and reinstalling it.
(Just logging out and back into my account earlier did not do anything.)
Photos are now uploading again.
