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
DBXCommunity
5 years agoCommunity Manager
What’s new: Scanner App
There’s nothing worse than forgetting an idea, or losing an important piece of paper. The one thing we never lose, and usually don’t forget is our phone - so now with the Dropbox Scanner App, you can save, organize, and share important documents right from your phone. Dropbox Scan is a standalone app that lets you quickly transform all your physical documents into high-quality PDFs. It’s everything you love about doc scanner in the Dropbox app—but even faster and easier to use. The app is available to iOS users in English-speaking markets, and you can sign into Dropbox with your corp email or a Basic, Plus, or Professional account. Whatever the situation, whether it’s a piece of paper, a receipt or even a whiteboard of notes, you can conveniently save high quality scans to Dropbox.
- Receipts - Take the pain out of your next expense report, and save receipts as you go.
- Whiteboard drawings - Never feel rushed in a meeting or presentation again. Just use the doc scanner, and an image of the whiteboard will be uploaded as a PDF or PNG to Dropbox.
- Contracts, bills, and invoices - Now your filing cabinet can be digital, and take up a lot less space. And of course, you can share it with others who need access.
- Photos - We’ve all taken a photo of a photo, but now you can scan them and keep them safe, with the same phone - just better results.
- Business cards - Never lose an important connection! Easily upload business cards from meetings, conferences and trade shows—right from your mobile device.
- Magazine clippings - Instead of ripping out a piece of a magazine or newspaper scrap you will inevitably lose, just scan the page or excerpt into Dropbox using the document scanner.
- Personal cards and notes - Scan those thoughtful personal notes into Dropbox for keepsakes without the clutter.
- Handouts - Scan in materials from classes or seminars for easy reference— they’re a lot less likely to get crumpled or torn in a digital setting!
- Napkin sketches - Never lose your next big idea again.
There’s a Smart crop feature, Smart folder suggestions based on where you've saved recent scans, and you can even edit the scan for clarity!
You can probably tell we’re a little excited about this one! Which of these uses are you excited about?
- T111New member | Level 2
When will an Android version be available?
- Team HarrisHelpful | Level 5
When is this going to be available for Android?
I have never understand why companies develop an app to only be available for ios user before it is available for Android. It's as if Android user are second class.
- edc1951New member | Level 2
Completely agree. It gets very tiring. And it would be nice to have an answer from Dropbox about when they DO plan to have it available.
- lenmacNew member | Level 2
None of the new suggestions really appeal to me. The programme is of little use to me as the things that are important to me I am unable to find on my hard drive. They are there, i.e. my 2500 contacts and my email. The two most important things for me but where are they? Not easy to find like photos or docs. What about an easy video for those less familiar with modern tech?
- jonalisaHelpful | Level 5
dropbox allows you to type in a name for each document as you get ready to save it, and you can create different file folders to hold each group of documents/pictures/etc. By giving each a unique name, (which can be pretty long, even). upi can simplify your life a bit. I have a folder for each cruise, and all photos/receipts/etc go in for that event. In another folder, I keep the receipts from getting my house ready to sell. Another folder for family stuff, one for each club I belong to... Think of it as a file cabinet. Dropbox is the overall cabinet. A folder is like a drawer, and inside each folder you can have even more folders (year, then month1, month2, etc); inside each of these folders, you can further subdivide into categories as necessary. So, then, you want to see a photo from your trip to Disneyland in 2018, it would be /2018/june/disneyland to find all the photos there.
I hope this helps.
- BadjerCollaborator | Level 9
This is a good idea as a starting point
The friction point that I have ran into is that the "search" does not find everything in the file titles (or folder). I was trying to use some naming conventions that I could use on more than one file to help surface the files with that same naming convention. So for me if I am looking for an item sometimes I find it sometimes I don't. I have brought the issue up with the support team & they are aware of the issue. Apparently the search bar is still in the beta phase & is going to be worked on more deeply in 2021.
Your idea sounds like a good approach if you need your content to exist in one area. This could be very helpful for me once the search can actually find everything in the title on a consistent basis
TY 🙏
- avilip71New member | Level 2How do I organize photos?
- VdgExplorer | Level 4
Just downloaded the app tonight. Tried to use it to scan some receipts for an insurance claim.. got 2 ok scans, 1 barely acceptable and the last I just gave up after over 10 tries and no useable scan. It is something wrong in the conversion to pdf , because the initial capture looks ok.
this is a great idea and I love that it connects right to Dropbox. I often have trouble saving directly to Dropbox from my iPhone or iPad. I probably won't use until it is fixed.
- Gregg T.Helpful | Level 6try the Office Lens app, from Microsoft. Although it has a flaw when converting a image taken with a rotated camera to a PDF, it does everything that this Scan app does, but saves to OneDrive. It's a bit tedious to have to copy documents from OneDrive to dropbox, but the scan quality is generally excellent.
- ChewbykaNew member | Level 2This forum is just users talking amongst ourselves Dropbox isn't reading or not bothering to respond. Simple question, when will Android app be available and no response. Waste of time.
- AmyCommunity Manager
Hi everyone, thanks for your interest! Currently the iOS app is available to download, and we’ll let the team know of the interest in an Android version.
- Team HarrisHelpful | Level 5
As I stated in my post, when is this going to be available for Android?
I have never understand why companies develop an app to only be available for ios user before it is available for Android. It's as if Android user are second class.
- lindajbranderNew member | Level 2
Amy - given that there are more android users than iOS, I would have thought 'the team' would be aware there
would be interest. There are more than 2 billion android users on the planet for goodness sake!!!
- Henry PearceNew member | Level 2
Why would you even considder pandering to IOS when it only has a 27% of the market and Android has 71%? The only reasion I can thik of is some affilliation to this minority opperating system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_operating_systems
- Gregg T.Helpful | Level 6Because rather than having a single set of standards to adhere to, such as in iOS, developers must understand and try to make their applications compatible with a wide variety of hardware and software configurations.
So it’s not actually 72%, but 100’s of smaller markets, each of which must be individually tested for compatibility against a Dropbox app. If a developer finds a problem on the 100th device, she needs to test that fix against all of the 99 other devices. Not only is this tedious and expensive, but it is a really good way to burn out your developers.
See?
- JackLvHelpful | Level 5Not excited about any, as I have an Android device and it is only available for ios. Hate when companies show preference to one operating platform especially when I pay for the premium service. It also looks like Dropbox makes no replies to it's users in here. 🙁 Seeing lots of posts that are 2 weeks old with no comments from Dropbox.
- Gregg T.Helpful | Level 6After I’ve scanned a multi-page PDF and saved it, how do I add a new page to it via Scan?
It always wants to create a new PDF, which would be fine if there was some way to combine the pages of the 2 documents together in Scan. This means I have to get the Scan exactly right before saving it, but in many cases I don’t know if it’s going to be right until I display the PDF in context (and find it there’s glare or I cropped it wrong) or try to print the PDF (and find out the scan doesn’t fit on the page) - BadjerCollaborator | Level 9
The ones I would be excited about would be photos, sketches, whiteboard, handouts, etc if it means that you can search thru it via search/ OCR/ whatever term you want to use.
To say that you want to digitalize things, to never lose a big idea, never be rushed about losing your meeting notes only works so far with scanned notes. If all it does is convert it to png/ pdf/ etc then it only helps to a certain point. Basically becomes a dumping ground since the more info you have the harder it is to find if you are limited to folders only without tags or the ability to add text notes
Searching within the images makes this very useful. Many times I use notes in class etc but once again it is only helpful to a given point if the OCR cannot search the handwritten text
It would also be helpful if there was an ability to convert images already in DB to searchable images vs finding the paper doc again (if you still have it) & scanning it.- Gregg T.Helpful | Level 6i have not tried the OCR features, but if it turns it to work for your situation, you can snap pictures of your image-based document (already in dropbox) by displaying it on a second screen. so open the document on a computer/tablet, zoom to the largest size, and use your phone to snap the picture into your app. you’d have to page thru the document (what a pain for a long document!), and images might lose crispness, but if it saves time overall, it might be worthwhile.
finding the right document, especially if you have lots of them in a small number of folders, is a challenging issue for me. i try to pack essential “keywords” into the filename, but usually that’s not enough. you could consider using the dropbox searchable comments/tags to store more keywords. the issue for me is remembering the keywords a year later when it’s time to search. google had a feature to index files — i don’t know if they do support that — by installing the google search engine in your computer so you’re not exposing your private files to the world. dropbox should replace their search engine with google’s engine, i think.- BadjerCollaborator | Level 9I have not been able to make comments come up in the search results. It was one of my thoughts as well to create a hack tag system of sorts. Would be greatbidea if it could work
- pamee48Explorer | Level 3
I tried to locate tris App on my andoid phone in Playstore but couldnt find it. Where is it?
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