One of the best Dropbox features – Camera Upload

One of the nice features of Dropbox is the ‘Camera Roll’, it’s a simple and automatic way to copy photos between devices. Most commonly from your smartphone (Apple, Android) to your computer. It works automatically and often takes only seconds from taking the photo to it appearing on your computer.

It saves you have to bother copying photos from your smartphone because they appear on your Windows or Mac computer/tablet automatically. Take a photo, then look in the ‘Camera Uploads’ folder to insert the image into an Office document or email. Camera Upload also works for ‘screen shots’ taken on devices which makes it invaluable for technical writers.

Apple and Microsoft’s Skydrive have similar features but we prefer Dropbox Camera Upload because its ‘agnostic’, meaning it works across a mix of Windows, Mac, Apple and Android devices.   Sadly there’s no Dropbox app for Windows Phones … we can only hope that changes.

Setup

Open up the Dropbox app on your device and look for the Camera Roll option.

On Android devices it’s under Dropbox Settings | Camera Upload

As you can see, there are options to:

• Turn Camera Upload on/off
  
• Upload using Wifi only or mobile broadband when available
  
• Maximum size of each upload (usually to limit upload of longer videos).
  
• Choose to upload photos or photos & videos.

On the iPad the Camera Upload settings look like this:

On a computer with Dropbox software installed, look for the ‘Camera Upload’ folder. In that folder you’ll see all the photos taken on linked devices.

Note: if you have more than one device connected to the same Dropbox account (e.g. members of a family) then the one Camera Uploads folder will have photos/videos from all devices.

You can share a Camera Upload folder with other people, just like any other Dropbox folder. See the above image with a folder ‘Camera Uploads from Rod’.

See Also

• Dropbox Alerts in Outlook
• Cloud storage summary
• Sharing / Collaboration of documents via Dropbox
• Dropbox deleted file recovery
• Dropbox – looking at changes in files or folders
• Dropbox software
• Sending files using Dropbox