Why does Dropbox insist on renaming my files?

I know that. In fact, I am not even asking for a way to customize the way that Dropbox renames files. It should not be renaming them in the first place. At all! I simply ask that it leaves be my file names. This should be the default: not touching people's file names.

What do you achieve by renaming the files anyway? You're not filing them in different folders automatically for organizational purposes, not by default anyway. They are all just dumped in the same camera upload folder anyhow, just with different names compared to the original files on the phone.

This is not a new idea and not a new suggestion. Others have asked for this for a long time, long before me, and it was never forwarded to the right team (dev team or whatever the right team is) for consideration. Not that I am aware of or have found evidence of on the forum. For example Pete3000 has made this suggestion, but his suggestion was never forwarded due to premature closure of the topic. The topic was reportedly closed because of lack of support by other users.

How can other users have a chance to support the idea if you keep closing the topic before it gains traction?

This is what Walter  from Dropbox had to say on that:
"This idea has been closed due to inactivity and can no longer be voted for. If you have a similar idea please share it with us here."

Pete3000created the topic on 04-03-2021 (April), and it was closed by Walter in November of the same year, 7 months later. Why even close it? Was it somehow problematic to leave it open? I have been online long enough to know that there are forums that don't close old topics until they are at least 5 years old or 60 months, and only then do they force people to start a new discussion on the same topic. Others still never close a topic of discussion, unless they have a very good reason to do so.

In fact, Walter's assertion that it's no longer possible to vote on the suggested idea is false. I was able to vote on it a few days ago. Maybe you don't have your forum settings configured right? It should not be possible to vote if what you say is true.

Anyway... I give up! I have made it more than clear what's going on here and how I feel about it. If you don't want to listen to what users are saying, that's OK. You don't need to do a thing anymore. I have found my solution: OneDrive. I have already had a subscription plan with OneDrive for a few years now, but I was stuck on using Dropbox for camera uploads, and I used OneDrive in conjunction with Dropbox for certain things, since the year when Dropbox decided to lower the number of synced devices from 5 to 3. Today I disabled the camera upload in Dropbox on my phone and enabled it in OneDrive, and guess what?... it does not rename my files! Good news for me, bad news for you. Good bye!

Thanks for the tip! I will check it out. For this type of thing I normally use one called Bulk Rename Utility (BRU). BRU is a bit complicated to use, so I'm hoping Rename Master is easier.

I will need this sort of utility very soon as I have convinced my brother to stop using Dropbox and switch over to OneDrive and he has a lot of old files from Dropbox that need to be renamed.

I have added him to my OneDrive subscription, so he will have a premium service, free of charge, that's just as good as Dropbox. But the thing is, Dropbox saved him once when his old Galaxy phone just died one day, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason. It still had some battery charge in it when he left it to charge up, and minutes later when he came back to check the status, the phone was no longer responding. It was completely dead. Thankfully he had Camera Upload enabled in Dropbox, so all the photos and videos were safe in the cloud. Samsung took care of the rest with its own cloud, for things like contacts, messages, etc. So when he ordered the latest Galaxy phone he could simply restore all the data. He is therefore very grateful to Dropbox and reluctant to "drop" (let go of) the Dropbox.

This story just shows what an immense value that Camera Upload feature can have! The only issue is, it has now become my job to consolidate all his different "Dropbox, Dropbox (2), Dropbox (3), ..." folders into one, and then merge everything with his old photo collection that's named differently. We're talking about some 2000 files in his Dropbox folders. He was constantly running out of space on Dropbox, so he kept moving those files out to the desktop on the computer, to make room for new photos. Now he has several of those. He's not very technical and so he still doesn't fully understand how this cloud thing works. I was going to buy a Dropbox premium subscription for him, to make it easy on him, giving him a lot more room to play around with. But it's difficult to buy something in someone else's name. And since I have decided to transition to OneDrive, it made more sense that I help him do the same.

So again, thanks for sharing your view and thanks for the tip about Rename Master! I am still hopeful that Dropbox will do the right thing and either allow users to disable this in the settings or expand on this idea (fully implement it) and allow users to make their own naming rules.

Be well and be safe!