One month down in 2025: How are your resolutions coming along? Check out how to get back on track here.
Forum Discussion
Removal of duplicate photos in my dropbox photo library
I somehow uploaded several hundred photos from my iphone to dropbox. Not sure how I did it, but now I see a lot of duplicate photos in dropbox (carousel).
Well I'm just p!ssed off with it. I'm on Android. Easy to run out of space. I don't need this. Uninstall is looking likely....
I want to know when I do a system clean on my android including the large files will it delete the same files that are in my Dropbox
I have the same issue with tons of duplicates getting created, and I'm 100% sure it started when I got rid of Carousel and upgraded to a version of the Dropbox app (on iPhone) that does the uploads. I did both of those things today and I went from no duplicates to hundreds of duplicates.
I'm sitting here watching notifications pop into my window showing dozens of duplicate photos being added. As several of you have recently said, the problem is not how to remove the duplicates but how to prevent them in the first place. I use an Android smartphone and a MacBook Pro and these duplicates have been showing up for over six months now. It is frustrating, a huge waste of storage space, and totally preventable. Has anyone else noticed that there are no official comments, replies or suggestions other than the ridiculous 8-step removal process?? Come on Dropbox, get your act together! You have a basically great product so please listen to your users and fix this problem!
Yes. It's exceptionally frustrating that there is no response. All well and good to say, "See ya, I'm dropping you Dropbox" but it is integrated and working perfectly with a bunch of other my other apps.
Make this work again! It used to work and I can't imagine it's an intractable problem. Dropbox please let us know you are working on this!
I've looked into Google Photos and it doesn't work the same way. I don't want 800 virtual low res copies spread around the cloud. I want one reliable full res copy of each of my phone pictures until I can't add the thing to Lightroom and my photo back-up scheme.
I just filled out this Dropbox Forum survey. Maybe if a bunch of us fill it out and complain about the lack of response someone might at least let us know if there is a fix in the works.
https://dropbox.az1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4HFdMjdHWsKtQ8Z
I emailed with Dropbox support and this is the latest reply I've had:
If you are seeing (1) added to a file name, this means you added a file in a folder that already had the same type of file with the same file name. This usually happens with a copy.
If you see a file with -1 in the file name, this happens when a third party app changes your photo slightly. Dropbox sees this as a new photo and uploads it again. When it does, the file is renamed with a -1.jpg at the end. To stop this from happening, you will need to turn off camera uploads, uninstall any syncing or third party apps that could be editing your photos, and then turn camera uploads back on.
After this take a single photo. Is this photo duplicated? If not, you have uninstalled the application that is doing this.
I will try this later, but I don't think I have any other app syncing with Dropbox so I don't expect it to work.
An update from Dropbox support - I got this mail this afternoon:
Thanks for reaching out about this! We apologize for the hassle and we appreciate your patience.
We're aware of this bug and working to fix it. When we have a fix in place, we'll release an update via the App Store, so make sure to stay up to date with the latest Dropbox releases.
Again, thanks for letting us know and thanks for using Dropbox!
It's early December 2016 and this is still happening. I took 5 videos on 12/1 and 12/2. On 12/4 at 5:36pm, something caused copies of these 5 videos to be uploaded to Dropbox in reverse order. That's 317mb of extra data.
These are undetectable by duplicate file checking software, because they are changed in some small way -- the file size is slightly larger (by 76 bytes!):
This started happening when I got a new Samsung S7 a few months ago. Something on the phone (that was not on my last phone) is changing these files, and finding what is doing it is the best way to fix this. I looked at my Google Photos and there is nothing there. I can't find any Samsung Cloud or Sync enabled on my phone. What other things might be responsible?
Dropbox is just doing what it's supposed to, so on one hand it's not to blame, but as long as it keeps happening they're going to have an increasing number of unhappy users, so it's in their interest to help find the culprit.
- I think someone has found the responsible app. There is a Samsung "feature" that creates "events" out of your photos and possibly videos... Without being turned on and without informing you that it's doing this. (Maybe the next thing they can "give" us without asking is something to take all of our emails and texts and photos on a given day, and combine them into little stories! Wouldn't that be swell!) Anyway, go to Gallery and find Events (in a little pull-down menu), and turn off Auto-Create Events. Thanks to rin for finding this!
I use DuplicateFilesDeleter. It works like a charm, always!
I have been dealing with this for a long time. another issue is that I take a lot of pictures and then make edits (also on my other phones) mos tly for posting items I want to sell. But when I go to post the final edited image, all of them are there and I have no idea which is the one I decided to use. I also have the problem of having as many as 10 duplicates of the same picture, sometimesI want to keep randomly within the same folder, as well as in many other folders. I never get a message that there already one and which one do I want to keep. And they all have different image sizes and I need to look at them both to see which I want keep choose. want to move all my pictures off dropbox folders and Dropbox.com. I can't even just move them to a flash drive, I can only copy. So i create a new folder on laptop, move dropbox folders to that new forlder ad delete them on dropbox.There has got to be a better way! If I cancel my dropbox account, I will lose everything. So many are from places (other old external drives or otherwise unable to acess, etc) I do like that feature on Dropbox, because I have photos as old as 2003. but they'll be gone. I am not very experienced on windows or Android. I bought a new 256GB laptop and it has no more space it's all from Dropbox. It's very frustrating and confusing this way, Especially since there are so many duplicates in so many folders. I want to move them all to Google Photos. (which is a whole! separate thing I have'nt learned bout). I don't know if I move the entire folders from Dropbox folder and delete the now-empty folders from Dropbox in Windows on my laptop. will Dropbox create a new folder again or will it not upload if there is no longer that folder in dropbox folder. I have 50,000 pictures in so may places in so many different folders so manually deleting all the duplicates is not an option. I just don't know what to do. Bottom line I guess is I want to keep everything on dropbox.com as well as my laptop Dropbox folder. I've paused syncing on Dropbox untill I can deal with this issue first, Of course, I imagine I will have the same problems if I turn on sync dropbox again. And then closing my account while still havsing all the photos -minus all the duplicates- I now have on my phone and not uploaded anywhere yet. If anyone can make sense out of any of this post and help me out, Thank you. Again, I am sorry for the long, confusing post. Oh, and I can't move the new folder created for all my files copied from Dropbox in order get everthing on a flash drive and then delete my Dropbox folder because there is not enough space on my flash drive. I don't know which files will fit without finding out how big every file is and move that many to flash drive. As you can see, I HAVE ABSOLUTELY no idea what I'm doing and I don't have anyone who can help me. The last time I had a computer company tech come help me. I ended up with so many files not copied, and gone forever....
