Dropbox Photo Maitenance

Setting up someone's phone to get pictures to Picasa, and for some reason, her computer won't pick up the Android phone to see the pictures stores.  So this forced us to go the Dropbox route, hence, instructions on Dropbox.

I believe I went through directions to install on an iphone already.  For Android you just download it from the Google Play store, install, and punch in the same credentials you used setting up dropbox online.  When you first install, it will ask you if you want it to manage photos(or something like that) and you want to tell it to.  This will kick off transfering to your computer all your photos.

Management

There's really one reason I say you need to maintain this.  Space.  Dropbox currently gives you 2gb, and another .5 when you turn on syncing from your phone.  To give you some perspective, I typically have about 4gb of pictures and videos on my phone.  Obviously I can't store it all in dropbox.  I use it to transfer to my computer.

1. Sync Photos - Once you have Dropbox installed like I've said, it will sync.  If you run out of space you will see an error on your computer system tray or on the phone's dropbox app.  Though the simplest method is that you know new pictures aren't showing up on your computer.  They system tray icon looks like this:
If you see a red X on there, it's probably full.

2. Delete photos - This is simple enough, just select a picture and hit delete on the keyboard, or right click and Delete.  Remember to ctrl-click or shift-click to pick multiple photos at a time.


3. Move photos to existing folders on your computer.  This saves pictures off on your computer, but doesn't take up dropbox space. This is easy enough, just drag and drop.  As you get more pictures you may have to position the folders first, but it's simple enough.







4. Move photos to a new folder on your computer.  Again, to get space back on dropbox.  This is the only step with a little annoying twist.  Moving to a new folder is simple enough, right-click and choose "Move to New Folder".  Type in a new Folder Name and it's across.




The one annoying bit is that for whatever reason it puts that new folder into the dropbox folder.  So you need to then right-click on the new folder, and move it:

Then select My Pictures


5. Create an online Folder for viewing
If you have pictures you want available from any phone or dropbox website, you can do like step 4, but then don't move the folder to My Computer.  This will make it viewable from the dropbox app.  I typically use Shared Picasa Web Albums(since that's also my backup plan) but this could work too.