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Forum Discussion
I've set my iOS camera uploads to add only new photos, but it's trying to re-upload everything.
I went from a iPhone 11 to a iPhone 16 Pro a few months ago. I backed up photos to Dropbox before I moved everything to the new phone. Had issues with the new phone and Apple had me do a full factory...
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThat would be a setting in the phone or your machine, depending on how it is set up. That would be something you would need to check on your end.
When using the camera upload feature, you can select which folders you want to upload to your Dropbox account, so if the photos are coming from a different folder instead of the camera roll, then you can deselect that folder.
Uploads from Photos app to Dropbox are just from the main library, and they always went straight to the Camera Uploads folder in Dropbox.
I have to check on the re-uploading question, I have no idea how to do that (just looked in iCloud and Photos settings and don't see anything about that). That seems like an odd and useless default if it is actually re-uploading photos after they are synced to iCloud. But who knows. I'll report back.
I'm back - I tried to research but I can't be sure that iCloud is re-uploading to my Photos app as , nor can I figure out what to do about that. So I just tried a work around, but I don't think it worked. I can see the last photos that were backed up to my Dropbox, so I know where it stopped. So I tried to save new photos taken since then into an Album in my Photos app, and then in the Dropbox app, Camera Uploads, I selected to Upland from [that new album], and turned on camera uploads. But Dropbox seemed to be searching thousands of photos in my Photos app, not just that album. Is it because it's an album instead of a folder? It allowed me to select it so that was confusing. But if it needs to be in a folder, I can do that. Thank you so much for your advice.
- Hannah
Hey jlo-nyc, does the Photos app on your new phone currently contain the photos from your previous phone?
When you say that the Dropbox app is searching for older photos, would you mind sending us a screenshot of where you see that?
Yes, it does contain photos from my previous phone. So when I set up my new phone, I did connect to my iCloud and so the old photos that are not archived, I suppose, are in this new phone.
With my old phone, I would open up Dropbox app, select Photos in the nav at the bottom of the screen, and I could see "Backing up..." at the top scrolling through my Camera Roll, and it would take anywhere from 1 to a few minutes to figure out what was new (often a couple hundred), and then it would upload those. Now it's taking far longer, and it goes through thousands of photos. The last time I tried to upload, before I turned off uploading, the backing up function went well past 10k photos, and it wasn't done yet. Having tagged all the new stuff into an Album (in my Photos app) earlier, I can say there are. not even 5k photos/videos that are new since last upload to Dropbox. So is "Backing up..." just reviewing everything? It just stopped doing that. Now it says "Running camera uploads. Scanning your photo library..."
That said, it does seem to be uploading the new photos/videos since the last upload in early Dec.
