Dropbox allowance and automatic photo upload from an Android device

[321up]

I got 50GB of dropbox space with my phone, but that 'promotion' will shortly expire leaving me with 6GB.  That would be enough for me except a family member shares their photo dropbox folder with me and it seems their folder is using up my allowance.  I want to retain access to their shared photo folder but I don't want to pay £7.99 per month to boost my allowance.  The only solution I can see would for the family member to remove their old photos from their dropbox folder so the size of their folder will be within my allowance.  The problem is the family member does not have the technical ability to manage files without accidently deleting things that they should not    The system works well at the moment because their Samsung Galaxy camera (android os) automatically uploads to Dropbox and I can access + backup their photos remotely.  Presumably if I archived the photos from their shared dropbox folder then the camera would just upload them again, so I would need access to the camera to archive the old photos from there first.  Are there any tricks I am missing?  Is there an alternative service with an app that will automatically upload photos from an android device?

[Afasoas]

You could try temporarily archiving a file and waiting to see if it re-appears.

I would suggest creating a new dropbox folder, inviting family members, moving the pictures to said new folder and once other family members have joined, "leave" the folder. That means other family members will still have it in dropbox, but you won't. You could of course take your own archive copy before you leave.

[Plug1n]

With my HTC phone, I did a factory reset and signed up with a different email address and got the free year again.

This was not the primrary objective, as I have more than enough MS live.com space.

[Kim]

Hm.  So the contents of shared folders count against *everyone's* quota?  That's an unintuitive way of doing it (ie. not the way disk quotas are supposed to work).

Oh, I suppose otherwise you could just create an array of free accounts and consolidate them via shared folders.  Pah!

So what happens if you try to add a file to a shared folder and one of the users is out of space?  I can see that getting annoying very quickly.


(I have a dropbox account because it's occasionally useful for transferring files around, I don't tend to store things in it.)

[fuaran]

Instead of sharing the folder, you could put the photos in an album, then share the link to that album. Then if you send that link to anyone, they can view the photos, and download them all as a zip, without it counting towards their Dropbox quota (it also works if they don't have a Dropbox account).

But I don't know if you can set the Android uploads to get added to the album automatically?

[Jaded]

Yes, that's the solution. Nowadays you really have to 'share' DropBox folders, unless you truly are collaborating.

[Valiant]

Use Flickr instead? I believe they give you 1TB and also have auto upload.

[Gattopardo]

Flickr now are only connecting via a yahoo account, which I find a pain to use.