Skip to main content
Tag

Dropbox

Oct 02
Love0

Not enough space to sync Dropbox? How to use Selective Sync

By Blog

A Canadian reader recently contacted me about a problem. He had subscribed to Dropbox Pro and now had access to 1 terabyte of available storage space. Unfortunately, his hard disks on his Windows PC did not have enough space to sync the entire Dropbox account. How could he set up Dropbox so his hard disk wouldn’t be overwhelmed by photos and other files?

Fortunately, there is a solution. In this post, I’ll explain how to use Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature to limit which folders on your hard drive are synced.

Selective Sync is activated from Dropbox preferences. Follow these steps:

  1. Open Dropbox settings on your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer (click the Dropbox icon in your system tray, and then the settings icon)
  2. Click Preferences
  3. Click Account
  4. Click the “Change Settings” button next to “Selective Sync” (see screenshot, below).
  5. Use the checkboxes to select the folders you want to sync to your PC. The others won’t be synced.

Here’s what the setting looks like:

Not enough Dropbox storage? Try selective sync

If you’re interested in reading more tips and tricks about Dropbox, check out the second edition of Dropbox In 30 Minutes.

May 10
Love0

Dropbox’s Carousel app: The 1-minute review

By Blog

Dropbox offers an optional mobile app for iOS and Android called Carousel. As I described in the revised and expanded Dropbox In 30 Minutes, 2nd edition, The Dropbox Carousel app is a great way to view and share the photos stored in your Dropbox account, as well as those stored on your phone’s camera roll.

Once installed, Carousel asks permission to access the settings and content on your Dropbox app. After granting it, Carousel will display thumbnails of all of the photos and videos stored in your Dropbox account, not just those in Camera Uploads. It arranges them on a timeline which you can scroll through using a finger.

The first time you open the app and scroll through your collection, it can be quite a surprise to see photos that you shot or transferred to Dropbox months or years ago. The marketing for Carousel promises “every photo and video is safe forever.”

You can easily distribute photos in your Carousel collection to others. Once you find a set of photos that you want to share, tap the share icon. You’ll be able to select certain photos, and then email them to friends with a short message. Recipients have the option of viewing the thumbnails in the email, or downloading them to the Carousel app installed on their own phones.
Here are two views of the Carousel app. Browsing the timeline is displayed on the left, and the sharing process is shown on the right:

Dropbox Carousel app screenshots for Android

Overall, I think Carousel is a great idea, especially for those Dropbox users who use Camera Uploads a lot. However, I think some of the sharing options could be improved. The obvious target: Carousel integration with Facebook. But even having SMS or MMS support would be cool.

Apr 08
Love1

How big is my Dropbox video?

By Blog

A reader, Arthur, had a question after reading this post about videos being uploaded to Dropbox. He asked, “How can I tell how big is my video, before I upload it to Dropbox?” A related question: “How can I tell how big is a file in Dropbox?” Being able to determine the size of a video (or any other file) is useful not only for managing your Dropbox account (free accounts only hold a limited amount of space) but also for determining how long it will take to upload or download a file from Dropbox.

To answer Arthur’s question: To see how big a video is, there are a couple of methods.

  1. Windows: Open My Computer or the Windows file explorer and RIGHT-CLICK on the title of the video or the icon. Select “Properties”. That should show you the size of the file.
  2. Windows: In the Windows file explorer utility, change the view so it displays the column that contains the file size for each file in the open folder.
  3. Mac OS X: If you are using a Mac, find the file in Finder and right click on it and select “Get Info”.

Note that all of these methods work, regardless of whether the file is stored on your hard drive, an external storage device, a USB drive, or your Dropbox folder on your PC or Mac.

If the video on your hard drive or USB stick is huge, it’s possible to upload it to Dropbox but it may take a long time, depending on the speed of your Internet connection. I have personally uploaded or accessed videos that are more than 100 MB in size. For a file of that size, it will take at least 10 minutes on a fast Xfinity or FiOS connection, and possibly hours if you are using DSL or a slow Wi-Fi service.

It’s easy to share the video once it has been uploaded to Dropbox. For that matter, it’s easy to share any file using Dropbox (as I explained in Chapter 4 of Dropbox in 30 Minutes, 2nd Edition). Simply right-click on the file name again and use “Share Dropbox Link” (see screenshot, below). That link will be copied to your clipboard, and you will be able to paste it into an email, Twitter, Facebook, Word, etc.

How big is my Dropbox video

Oct 14
Love0

Dropbox Android app: How to delete a file or folder

By Blog, Video

If you use Dropbox on an Android phone or tablet, you may be looking at the minimalist interface and wondering how to delete a file or folder. It’s easy to do, as this short, two-minute video demonstrates:

If you have to delete multiple files within a Dropbox folder, but don’t want to delete the entire folder, the Android app will slow you down. In such cases I recommend you handle deletions on the desktop. The video How To Permanently Delete Multiple Files in Dropbox, explains how.

For more tips on how to use Dropbox for collaboration, backing up files, and making it easier to manage photos, check out the contents for Dropbox In 30 Minutes.

Sep 12
Love1

What’s the longest video you can add to Dropbox?

By Blog

Tonight a reader of Dropbox In 30 Minutes sent me an email asking about the longest video that can be added to a Dropbox account. It’s a common question. People are used to hitting the 10-minute or 15-minute limit on YouTube, and it’s natural to think that Dropbox has similar caps.

But here’s the thing: There is no time limits on videos. The only limit is the size of the video, which must be less than the amount of free space in your account. So, if you have a free 5 GB Dropbox account, and have .5 GB of photos and Word docs in there, that means you can upload an additional 4.5 GB of other stuff. The other stuff could be a gigantic video file, or a bunch of smaller video files, or anything else whose size is less than 4.5 GB total.

Note also that the bigger the video files are, the longer they will take to sync. For this reason I usually sync videos that are less than 150 MB in size, which might take 20 minutes to sync to Dropbox on my wireless Internet connection at home (Comcast Xfinity).

Once the video is in the Dropbox folder, you can either share the link to the video or share the folder with your friends so they can access the videos and add their own materials if they want. Keep in mind that there are security and privacy considerations around both of these methods of sharing, covered in Chapter 4 of Dropbox In 30 Minutes (available as an ebook and in paperback and PDF formats. You can buy the guide here).

Dropbox Video Length

Jun 07
Love1

What is Camera Uploads, and how to manage photos in Dropbox

By Blog, Video

If you are new to Dropbox, you may have seen a folder called “Camera Uploads”. What is Camera Uploads? It’s a feature in the Dropbox mobile app that automatically syncs the pictures you take on your smartphone (iPhone, Android, etc.) and automatically uploads them to your Dropbox account. This short blog post and the two videos shows how Camera Uploads works, and how you can manage the storage space and photos in it.

As you can imagine, Camera Uploads takes care of a big problem — syncing photos between your smartphone and PC. It happens wirelessly in the background when the app is turned on, so you don’t even have to think about it.

But Camera Uploads causes a few problems:

  1. The uploaded photos and movies eat up your Dropbox storage space
  2. The photos aren’t organized into albums

The following video and the linked blog post I wrote earlier this year show you how to manage Camera Uploads. The video shows you how to delete photos, either one at a time or in batches. The blog post shows you how to use Dropbox Photos, to organize the pictures in Camera Uploads into albums.

For more information about Dropbox and how to get the most out of the desktop and mobile apps, download the ebook or buy the paperback version of Dropbox In 30 Minutes. For more information about Dropbox, visit Dropbox.com.

Video: Manage the Camera Uploads folder

Blog post: What are Dropbox Photos, and how can they help you organize images?

Apr 26
Love0

How to kick out other users from a shared Dropbox folder

By Blog, Video

In less than 3 minutes, the following video will demonstrate how to kick out another user from a shared Dropbox folder. “Kick out” may sound mean, but it’s actually the term Dropbox uses!

Why would kicking out another user be necessary? Perhaps the other person no longer needs to collaborate on the files in the folder, or he or she has been fired. Whatever the reason, this video shows how to review and select other users for ejection.

This method of kicking out other people can be used by owners of shared Dropbox folders. If you are merely a member of the shared folder who was invited by the owner, you can’t kick anyone out — but you can leave (explained in this video). The video also describes some special considerations relating to files contributed by the person being kicked out.

The narrator of the video is the author of “Dropbox In 30 Minutes”, a quick guide that not only explains how to set up Dropbox, but also shows how to leverage special features for collaboration and document sharing. See the contents of the guide here, and view purchase options here.

To view the video full-screen, press the rectangular icon at the bottom of the YouTube video player: