You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Status:
Gathering Support
Preserve file Creation Dates(and other metadata) in mobile app versions
The ability to preserve, view, sort by, etc the original Creation Dates(and other metadata) of files is missing or severely limited in the Dropbox mobile apps.
People who don’t use Dropbox primarily for business purposes on a computer but, as many of us do these days, use our smartphones as our primary(or only) method of keeping track of media/documents/audio files/etc are having to deal with the frustrating situation of trying and failing to backup/reorganize/download to another mobile device/etc our files without losing this extremely important file metadata.
I can’t even view ANY file information on non-photo files, and the photos are difficult to even upload with a title that reflects the actual creation date.
If not uploaded at a painful 1 image at a time (and many times not even then) the file name will be changed to the upload date/time.
The creation date is ALWAYS listed as the upload time or the last time that it was moved, downloaded, re-uploaded, etc.
There’s no sort by CREATION date, only sort by Modification date which is just a complete denial of basic file management for those of us who manage all of our files on mobile phones and tablets.
We desperately need full file information accessibility for Dropbox mobile apps… ESPECIALLY the ability to preserve and sort by the ORIGINAL file creation dates… and to not lose access to those creation dates when moved, renamed, downloaded, re-uploaded, etc, but to keep them intact despite all modifications.
Creation dates and modification dates can be preserved separately without sacrificing one for the other, as long as the files’ metadata remains intact.
I agreed with the importance if preserving file creation date. Dropbox used to do this, as my company has been using Dropbox to upload files. photos and videos at least monthly for that last 10+ years. We've been running a specific procedure "export unmodified original" from an iphone for the sole purpose of preserving original meta data and file creation dates (date&time photo/video were captured). We are noticing that some time last year-ish, Dropbox has LOST 10+ years of file creation data and now "date created" has been changed to match "last modified" or date/time uploaded. This is over ten years of important business data lost. I double-checked this looking at an old backup drive (clone of my laptop) from over 5 years ago, and that confirms this change with the Dropbox app. File creation dates were preserved in the past. I'm now exploring other solutions like Box/One Drive/Google Drive for an alternative. Seeing Dropbox Staff comments on similar posts/complaints about this issue claiming "all cloud-based systems should be expected to use upload time as creation time" which I find not only inaccurate and misleading but also dodging responsibility and seriousness of the issue. Very disappointing. I've had a paid account for almost 10 years and all that money I paid now feels like a waste and a rip off.
