I was initially ecstatic about Dropbox, but they seem to be at best stagnant in terms of functionality.

It was my solution for having access to all my photos on all devices, but then they canceled Carousel with the promise that its functionality would be rolled into the main app. That hasn't happened. The photos feature on iOS is pathetically limited, with slow loading times, no way to organize photos (you can't even access albums you create on desktop), and inadequate sync functionality. The web client isn't much better. What exactly are all those engineers doing with their time?

I am increasingly wary of Google, and do not wish to give them all of my photos. What solutions am I left with? I don't feel like my asks are a tall order for a company of Dropbox's size. I basically want what the old Picasa desktop app provided, except synchronized between all my devices.

I can't possibly be the only one with this problem: an ever-growing library of photos and videos, scattered across various phones, DSLRs and computers with the need to organize them and share them easily. I am happy to pay.

For your usecase, Prime Photos [1] from Amazon, where they meld the traditional album and folder metaphors with auto-classifying ML -- the latter which you can luckily turn off if it creeps you out, unlike with Google.

But this is an under-served market and many people would pay to some paltry amount a month to have their family photos (or professional photographs) kept safe in the Cloud. Unfortunately most cloud storage providers are chasing the (presumably much more lucrative) enterprise market with document-editing and office-y features.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/photos/home

This looks interesting, I wasn't aware Amazon had entered this space. I'm not sure I trust Amazon either, but at least they're explicit in their desire to take my money in exchange for products and services.

Edit: it doesn't appear to provide any ability to organize photos yourself?

For the time being you can freely switch two different interfaces for the same backend: Prime Photos and Amazon Drive [1]. It's clunky. Cloud Drive was their first pass, Photos is their second and is barely a few months old, and I'm not whether the old interface will be disabled for Photos users at some point.

The uncertainty about the product direction is a bit off-putting, but it works decently well for my use-case [2], even if now you can't get that particular tier without Prime.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709221#12709936

Why should a photo app be integrated into a filesystem? That sounds like bad engineering to me. And also like a bad value-proposition.

A filesystem should be just that, a filesystem. And thirdparty apps should be able to use it to store pictures and such.

What are your recommendations for a fast, intuitive, portable third-party solution that uses Dropbox as a data store for my use case?

Edit: While separating these concerns (storage and presentation) is a solid software engineering approach, without open standards it would seem to just add additional layers of vendor lock-in and brittleness. Syncing to local storage is a non-starter for mobile.

I'm satisfied with Dropbox, because it does what it advertises: it syncs files between computers without getting in the way. I would be very worried if it weren't stagnant in terms of functionality, because change for change's sake is the path to bloated crapware.

If you want your photos on all devices, Dropbox does this for you. If you want software to look at the photos that is a different task and should be accomplished by a different piece of software.

People say this, but i actually hate it. Every time i use it i get confused, it's UI is slow and weird. I prefer Google Drive, but I might be a weird user.

Why are you using the web UI? Dropbox is at its best as just a folder on your hard drive that works like any other, except it effectively exists simultaneously on all your devices.

I'm going to guess that the person also uses Google docs and or slides which is mostly web-based -- yes you can download it for offline use but that's a hassle.

I use both the sync client and the web app (depends on the situation). The web app for the google suite is just so much better, the Dropbox website is painful. The sync client for Dropbox I used to find slightly better, but it's not better enough to justify the massive license costs of Dropbox in comparison to google drive. All in all, each to their own!

I generally like Dropbox, but they made a change which has really annoyed me and made me like them much less. You used to be able to have a folder of html files in your public folder, index them with another html file, and then generate a bit.ly URL pointing to the index file. Boom, instant website for sharing things with a handful of people. They deprecated that funcionality and now several sites I made like that don't work, which is incredibly annoying. Not sure what that got that besides alienating power users.

This is the main reason I'm considering my Pro subscription. As a power user not using the collaboration or business features, having a very easy way to get a public, no web takeover link via the public folder was worth the cost (in addition to symlink syncing folders across computers). It truly was a killer feature.

I'm in the same boat. The email was garbage, too:

We’re always looking to improve the Dropbox sharing experience. The Public folder was the first sharing method we introduced, and since then, we’ve built even better ways for you to share securely and work together with your team.

As a result, we’ll soon be ending support for the Public folder. Dropbox Pro users will be able to use the Public folder until September 1, 2017. After that date the files in your Public folder will become private, and links to these files will be deactivated. Your files will remain safe in Dropbox.

If you’d like to keep sharing files in your Public folder, you can create new shared links. Just make sure to send the new URLs to your collaborators.

Double-speaking crap. They've broken literally thousands of links I've posted around the Internet since I started using Dropbox. I pay for Dropbox Pro specifically to have more space in my Public folder. And they chose to be pretty jerkish about it, to boot. Gross.

Unfortunately for me, Dropbox has never been a pleasure as an OSX user. The number of times dropbox just spins eating up cpu while trying to index all my files has forced me to uninstall it. Also since my company uses it for all client work, and they still haven't figured out selective sync (https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Stop-auto-inheriting...) I was occasionally finding all my broadband and space getting eaten up by a new client folder.

Weird, it's never spun for me.

I passed when I learned that in order to sync target directories they all had to be moved and live under the /Dropbox namespace, and that I would now be working within that namespace for my various projects. No thanks. That was a while ago - maybe they are different now?

Its still like that, but you can just create a symbolic link to the folder outside. Dropbox will follow the link and sync the files.

Dropbox does not cooperate well with symlinks. For instance, if you create a symlink in your Dropbox folder to My Documents on Windows, the Dropbox folder will duplicate the My Documents files. Takes up twice the space.

EDIT - great, I will give Dropbox another shot.

Which alternative are you using ? (if any)

Syncing outside folders to Dropbox used to be such a pain because symlinks/junctions don't sync changes as they happen (you need to restart Dropbox each time in order for it to sync changes) so that's why we built Boxifier. Disclaimer: I am one of the founders.

I hope their IPO fails spectacularly for the singular reason that they have a board member who supports warrentless surveillance [1].

This seems like a huge issue for a company that is entrusted with user data. If Dropbox continues to be successful, their support of warrentless surveillance will become the norm. I don't use their service. If you value the security and privacy of your data they seem like a poor choice.

[1] Condoleezza Rice (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/)

The product works well for consumer use cases. However, when it comes to business use their technology isn't there yet. The upcoming Project Infinite will however be a step forward.