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.

[alexsontgerath]

@Dropbox:

It's very dissapointing that you skip the album function including automatic upload. It is a essential function from Dropbox with much added value.

The workarround you describe in you announcement doesn't work !!

Gif the users at least a tool to move the photo's from a album to a map. Selecting the photo's and move them to a folder doesn't work!!

Give us correct information and a reaction about a reasonable workaround.

[Drakhar]

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@JedDinger wrote:

I disagree, since I use the dropbox album feature almost exclusively for business. As a contractor, I'm able to quickly bring up collected images of job sites to share with my employees. No scrolling around with everyone tapping their feet waiting. Albums are awesome, synced uploads are awesome. 

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You have a point there, but when I said in my post "large customers" I meant that.

By that definition you and I who use Dropbox for simillar purpose are not "large customers".

I'm still sad and woried about all those albums I will have to recreate at Google Photos.....

cheers

[Charles L.5]

I suspected this was in the offing when Dropbox sent out a questionnaire that was heavily focused on photos.  I called Dropbox out in my responses, but apparently it is marching along.

As an IP lawyer who has seen a lot, I have 3 working theories as to what may be behind this move:

1. Poor Business Judgment:  Believing it failed to win over consumers with Carousel, Dropbox dropped it, and is convinced it must minimize photo services to be perceived as a "serious" business app.  That, of course, is a false dilemma. There is little or no overhead cost in being both, and no value in driving its customers who like the photo service away.
2. It’s a Contract Issue: Carousel appears to have been licensed, or there was no reason to drop it.  It may be that there was a noncompetition clause that requires Dropbox to get out of the photo-specific business after a certain time.
3. It’s a Patent Issue. The move to “we’ll just put your photos in a folder” has the smell of a patent holder threatening to sue over online photo storage, or perhaps photo album-sharing.  I don’t know if that’s the case, but Dropbox’s approach could be a work-around, since obviously putting photos in folders is prior art.

Whatever is going on, Dropbox’s attempt at coy messaging on this demonstrates it is either inept at marketing or just doesn’t care.  However, working oneself into a lather over changes one hasn’t seen yet is counterproductive.  I’m willing to give Dropbox a chance to roll out a useful product: one that maintains automatic file uploads and viewing, and posting to outside services, since I use Dropbox for many other things.  The UE is a bit ancient, but it has the virtue of being simple. If Dropbox fails to satisfy, the market will provide – it’s not the only cloud in the sky.

[JedDinger]

I believe that's an excellent theory. Your point that the wording is coy supports your claim that there are some legal issues at the foundation of the change. I would imagine that they are still in the process of trying to figure out a more practical solution to making the conversion, but until they figure out how to do it the current announcement is a stopgap measure.

[RichardDBX]

Hi all,

Thank you all for the comments and questions about the upcoming changes to photos.dropbox.com. We understand this decision impacts the way you share and organize your photos, and we’d like to address a few points of confusion.

After June 30, the web Photos page will continue to be a place where you can view all of your photos across Dropbox folders, but will no longer contain the speed scroller functionality, or the ability to create, share, or modify albums and sets of multiple photos. All of your photos will remain safe in your Dropbox account, and there are still many ways for you to work with photos in Dropbox. The changes to this page do not impact the way you share and organize photos through Dropbox folders, shared folders, or shared links. 

The updated page (dropbox.com/photos) will display your photos as thumbnails. You will be able to sort your photos the same way you can sort photos on the photos.dropbox.com page today — by the creation date of the photo.

We apologize for the confusion around the changes to albums, and we’d like to provide some additional details:

• After June 30, you’ll no longer be able to create new albums, or make changes to existing albums on photos.dropbox.com.
• If you’ve shared an album or set of photos via a Dropbox shared link, those links will continue to work after June 30. You can access these links from the links page in order to view your photo albums.
• We’ve added additional tips and suggestions to our Help center article on how to recreate your albums as Dropbox folders, and how to use other Dropbox features to share and organize your photos.

There are no changes to photos you’ve shared, or will share in the future, through Dropbox shared folders or shared links. Any existing photos you’ve shared through these methods will not be impacted by the changes to photos.dropbox.com.

We recognize that this change may cause frustration. Thank you all for the feedback you’ve shared with us, and please keep it coming. We’ve communicated this feedback to our team and will use it to inform future Dropbox features.

Regards,

Richard

[Note: This post was marked as 'solved' to be pinned to the top of the thread discussion and allow users to easily find it]

[bwraith]

I agree completely. I have invested a great deal of time in finding photos that very often do not have the right date in them and come from multiple folder sources on dropbox. They have provided no way that I can see to easily preserve these groupings in folders. I would have to "navigate" to them, but they provide no way to easily identify the locations of the photos. Even the file names are suppressed in the photo view. I also considered "select all" and download, thinking I might then upload them back into a folder, but many of my albums exceed the 1GB download limit. I would have to break the album up into pieces and download and upload small chunks at a time. This is so lame of Dropbox, I just can't believe it. If they could provide a simple migration path, I would be much happier, but they are just leaving us all to pick up the mess ourselves. I've estimated it would take me 15 minutes to 1/2 hour to painstakingly download each album and re-upload somewhere else (not Dropbox), of which I have 80 albums. So, I guess it will take me something like 20 to 40 hours to go through and preserve my albums. Dropbox, can't you provide a migration path? For example, allow people to "select all" in the photo album view for a given album, and provide a "copy" option. That way, I could at least go through and copy each album's photo and video files to a folder, which is what Dropbox says is my way to handle photos from here on out. Or, give me a way to create a larger download, at least, so I could get the photos back off in the grouping created by the album. Surely, these are not complicated options to provide, given that you already provide a way to "select all" in the photo view. I am apalled at the cheery, glib instructions from Dropbox. Lame. lame. lame, Dropbox.

[bwraith]

I would also consider continuing to use Dropbox for photo storage if the camera uploads option remains. In some ways the folder organization is simpler and cleaner, too, in many ways. I never was relying on Dropbox for anything sophisticated at all, nor did I expect it. However, what they have done at this point is make it very difficult (nearly impossible) for me to migrate my albums to folders, as they suggest. I have way too many files in different places and no way to retrieve the groupings that I can see. The download limit of 1GB means I would have to break downloads into chunks from the photos page, which would be painstaking and time-consuming, as well as requiring me to download and re-upload a huge amount of data simply to maintain the organization of the files. I don't understand why it would be so darn difficult to at least provide a way to copy an album into a folder in one shot. If Dropbox would provide that simple functionality on the photos page until 6/30, I could then step through my albums one by one and save them to a folder. It would be really nice if the folder name were set automatically to the album name, but just any functionality at all that could ease a migration to a folder organization would be enormously helpful.

[Mike H.57]

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I wouldn't say RichardDBX (Dropboxer)'s answer above is the solution. Rather it's partial clarification. But most of this we already knew. Here is a few tips which seem new

• If you’ve shared an album or set of photos via a Dropbox shared link, those links will continue to work after June 30. You can access these links from the links page in order to view your photo albums.

• We’ve added additional tips and suggestions to our Help center article on how to recreate your albums as Dropbox folders, and how to use other Dropbox features to share and organize your photos.

The Help centre article suggest this

Recreate albums by downloading them:

1. Sign in to dropbox.com.
2. Navigate to photos.dropbox.com/app/albums.
3. Click the album you want to download.
4. Select each photo you want to download by clicking the checkmark. You can click Select all to select all the photos in the album.
5. Click the ellipsis ( . . . ) icon.
6. Select Download photos.
7. Navigate to dropbox.com.
8. Click New folder.
9. Enter a name for your new folder and press Enter.
10. Upload the downloaded album into this new folder.
11. To share the photos with others, make the new folder a shared folders or share a link.

So for those that have lots of albums that;s probably the best option if you want to modify them in the future. Nowhere near as good as just preserving the album functionality of course.

It also means some duplication of photos if they already exist in some other structure that you want to maintain, or you want the same photo in multiple "album folders"

Still a major hassle ....

[Rich]

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bwraith wrote:

I would also consider continuing to use Dropbox for photo storage if the camera uploads option remains.

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The Camera Uploads feature is not, and never was, going away. Nothing relating to that feature is changing.

[bwraith]

I'm glad to hear the upload feature is not going away. I am, however, still apalled that Dropbox has provided no efficient way to migrate existing albums in the photos view to folders. I just can't understand why something that must be very easy for them to implement, i.e. providing an option to copy selected photos in the photos view to a folder on Dropbox, has not been done. In my case, that would change the migration effort from dozens of hours (I estimated 40 to 80 hours to re-create my albums into folders with the current functionality) to perhaps just a few hours of going through and "selecting all" for each album and copying each album's files to a folder, all right there on Dropbox. It's too darn easy to do that, and I am just shocked they haven't done it. For me, it's the difference between totally lame and reasonable, given they want to eliminate the photo page functionality.