Categories: Web

Dropbox experiments with frictionless photo and video importing

Dropbox has introduced an experimental new feature to the latest forum build of the application that automatically syncs photos and videos from cameras and smartphones to Dropbox once connected to a user’s desktop or laptop.

Users can choose to have Dropbox automatically sync all media to the service upon connecting a device – including Androids, iPhones and normal point-and-shoot digital cameras. This is the first time that Dropbox has offered such functionality at the most important stage of digital archiving – initial import.

Apple and Google have already set the precedent for frictionless media uploading to cloud-based storage. Apple’s Photo Stream saves a copy of every image taken on an iOS device to iCloud, while Android users can choose to automatically back-up smartphone media to Google+.

This “Experimental Forum Build” is available for Linux, Mac and Windows and comes complete with a strong warning to back-up your current version of Dropbox before upgrading.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

View Comments

  • This feature of Dropbox is sure to consume a lot of GB 'automatically' and i am not sure thats what the user wants. it sure looks like the price per GB will be the denominator no matter how you slice it. The companies are betting on more and more storage accumulating revenues and the users will be scanning the price tags. While this competition for cheap storage draws out, it is also a good thing for other apps looking to leverage the base storage and develop value added features as well. Take a look at Zukmo which provides for storage, sharing, content aggregation from multiple sources, file sync, versioning etc.

  • This feature of Dropbox is sure to consume a lot of GB 'automatically' and i am not sure thats what the user wants. it sure looks like the price per GB will be the denominator no matter how you slice it. The companies are betting on more and more storage accumulating revenues and the users will be scanning the price tags. While this competition for cheap storage draws out, it is also a good thing for other apps looking to leverage the base storage and develop value added features as well. Take a look at Zukmo which provides for storage, sharing, content aggregation from multiple sources, file sync, versioning etc.

  • This feature of Dropbox is sure to consume a lot of GB 'automatically' and i am not sure thats what the user wants. it sure looks like the price per GB will be the denominator no matter how you slice it. The companies are betting on more and more storage accumulating revenues and the users will be scanning the price tags. While this competition for cheap storage draws out, it is also a good thing for other apps looking to leverage the base storage and develop value added features as well. Take a look at Zukmo which provides for storage, sharing, content aggregation from multiple sources, file sync, versioning etc.

  • This feature of Dropbox is sure to consume a lot of GB 'automatically' and i am not sure thats what the user wants. it sure looks like the price per GB will be the denominator no matter how you slice it. The companies are betting on more and more storage accumulating revenues and the users will be scanning the price tags. While this competition for cheap storage draws out, it is also a good thing for other apps looking to leverage the base storage and develop value added features as well. Take a look at Zukmo which provides for storage, sharing, content aggregation from multiple sources, file sync, versioning etc.

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