The Photos page is changing...

[Darren S.1]

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 remants of the Carousel functionality - which makes me wonder what the point was in purchasing it in the first place:

"After that date, you’ll no longer be able to create or share albums on the web, or browse photos in the current timeline view. However, all your photos will remain safe in your Dropbox account."

Even funnier, it says:

"Creating a better photos experience

We’re continuing to work on new photos and file experiences on dropbox.com. As we learn more about how our users prefer to work with photos, we’ll launch improvements to the experience."

With these changes there will be no photos experience that is any different to normal files. If they remove camera uploads, that would be the last straw for me and I'll be moving to a different service.

[Qbis]

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?

[Qbis]

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. 

[Qbis]

can you do everything from flickr like from existing dropbox?

[Anthony A.25]

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.

[Anthony A.25]

https://www.flickr.com/tools/

Check out the mobile app. I'm definitely going to move all of my pictures to flickr as it has an auto-upload feature. Moving my other files to Onedrive, Box, Google Drive, etc. is easy, so I'm calling this solved, at least for my purposes.

[alphachannel]

I'll say it again: I'd consider not moving all my photos to iCloud or Google Photos if I didn't need something like http://photowranglr.com to let me find and sort through my thousands of pictures in Dropbox. Embrace computer vision! Otherwise I love Dropbox, its a great service.

[Gil K.1]

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 . . .

[harrysdad]

Totally agree.

Check out Google Photos/Drive if you haven't already.  I've migrated all of my Dropbox data across after their shocking decision and I couldn't be happier with the Google solution.  They offer a free unlimited storage solution for images too if you don't need to upload images in their raw format.

I also found a bit of free kit out the that connects to your Dropbox and Google account and will transfer everthing for you behind the scenes.

Silly fat cats at Dropbox made a bad call and they've lost me as a lifeling subscriber.

[Simone C.9]

Dear Rich

I've been trying to download these zips and its time consuming because half of them get an error message " Failed... Network Error"

Are other people also having this problem? So I have to keep retrying and sometimes they do sometimes they don't. Some arent downloading at all

[M S.1]

Simone,

Try using a download manager either as a separate program (app) or a browser plug in.  Sometimes browsers will error out some large file types.