I use Dropbox for few years now. as a paid personal customer.
I mostly use it as self-backed-up synchronized cross device storage.
Another usage is for backing-up all my photos. While Dropbox is far behind in the feature set (no Apple’s Live Photos support on iOS, lack of ability to auto or even manually remove media on device, etc…) it’s doing an ok job. Just like Firefox (at least for photos), I chose Dropbox as I prefer de-centralizing data available by me (instead for example keeping everything with Google).
As I have multiple devices, a common case is having picture on one device and sending it from another.
Last week, during a family trip I wanted to send a photo stored on Dropbox. as I normally do, I went to their Photo tab on the iOS device, long-press my non-3d-touch phone, clicked on the “Copy” option and went to paste it on Viber service.
This fairly simple task that worked just fine – got broken.
As we were driving (and I wasn’t the driver), I’ve decided to send a quick report of the issue.
I know I’m not the nicest person when support guys copy-paste things that feels like they’ve never read my message thoroughly.
So as a developer, if you’ve ever been surprised to see an issue going for so long not noticed, it might be your customer support filtering it for you….
Tal Aviram, Mar 1, 7:36 AM PST:
Feedback from: “Tal Aviram”
Feedback:
Argh! One of the last iOS updates broke copy paste of images!
iPhone SE here with 12.1.3
Before of that I could Just hold on image and copy. Then paste using Apple’s clipboard API. Useful for lightweight interaction. This is broken now!
Thanks.
Error Log Report:
None
Hank, Mar 1, 12:47 PM PST:
Hi Tal,
Thanks for writing in to Dropbox Support! My name is Hank and I am happy to help.
You can export photos or videos to your device’s “Camera Roll” album. Other files can be exported to applications that support their file types.
To export a photo or video to your device:
Open the Dropbox app and open the photo or video that you would like to export
Tap the ellipsis (..) on the top-right and select “Export” Tap “Save Image” (or “Save Video”) to save this file locally to your device
To export other files:
Open the file you’d like to export in the Dropbox app Tap the ellipsis (..) on the top-right and select “Export”. You will now see two rows of apps.
In the lower row, tap “Open In…” – this will show you a list of apps to export this file to. If you don’t see any apps indicated, you will need to download an app that supports this filetype.
Please note that exporting a file saves a copy of the file to another app. Exported files will not sync with your Dropbox account.
I hope this is helpful, please feel free to write back if you have any additional questions or comments — I´m always just an email away!
Kind regards,
Hank
Tal Aviram, Mar 1, 12:54 PM PST:
Hi Hank,
I’m afraid this is bad support.
What I’ve provided is a snippet of a bug report on a regression for a product I use (and actually pay).
What you’ve provided is a cumbersome workaround for a regressed functionality instead of logging the issue.
Hope you’ll log this bug/regression and keep updates if there’s a beta or some expected update that resolves this.
Tal.
Hi Tal,
Thanks for your response — apologies for any confusion my initial response may have caused.
Copying and pasting images within the Dropbox application should be a feature that works — so let´s investigate a little further into what could be causing this issue.
To help troubleshoot, could you please provide us with the following information? Please try and be as detailed as possible:
Do you know roughly when this issue started happening? In which tab of the app are you experiencing this issue? – Home (Recents), Home (Starred), Files, Settings, etc
Additionally, to help us better understand the problem, please assist us by providing a screencast of the issue you are having. You can do this by first enabling screen recording on your phone and then repeating the steps that cause the issue.
To activate screen recording please see here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207935
Thank you for your patience in gathering this information for us, and I look forward to your response!
Kind regards,
Hank
Hi Hank,
please bare in-mind I’ve wrote on-device short report that describes this shortly. but upon your request here is a standard bug report.
I really hope it’ll be forwarded or logged on your bug-tracking system as this is a huge regression for my daily usage.
It’s useless to screen capture as I can only provide the regression while you can in-house access the previous iOS builds to verify.
Dropbox iOS Photos Copy/Paste Broken
Steps to reproduce: (with iPhone8,4 12.1.3, v132.2.2):
1. Restart your device (making sure any clipboard content is clean).
2. Open the Dropbox.app (iPhone…)
3. Go to the Photos tab
4. click on a photo
5. as you see the photo, long press the photo (note: on 3D touch devices it might differ)
6. as you see the iOS Edit Menu, click the Copy command.
7. -in newer releases this provides a HUD showing progress bar and copied!-
8. press or interact to go to the home button.
9. open another app such as Whatsapp.
10. touch to enter an active chat.
11. touch the text field below to start writing within the current active chat.
12. -popup device software keyboard should appear-
13. long-press on the text-field.
14. you should see now the relevant iOS Edit Menu.
Expected Result:
the iOS Edit Menu should suggest “Paste” option and copy the UIImage through the UIPasteboard API!
Actual Result:
No paste menu is shown and it is impossible to paste a photo.
Hank, Mar 5, 4:50 PM PST:
Hi Tal,
Thank you kindly for your response, I really appreciate these details.
I would like to escalate this issue to a team who specializes in Mobile Application issues.
In order to do so, I will need a screencast of this behavior to accompany the ticket.
Thank you for your patience in gathering this information so I can escalate this issue,
Warm regards,
Hank
At that point I gave up..
Screencasting while might be useful to some extent means I need to do it on a clean device or process it afterward to keep my privacy (as I do not want to expose my personal photos for reporting a bug…)
Technical Update 3/10/2019:
I've discovered what seems to be the reason for the regression. It seems that my other device is capturing HEIC Images which the iPhone SE doesn't natively supports.
Newer dropbox app seems to try copying the actual image file which then isn't recognized as a normal image at least on iPhone SE and I presume also iPhone 6s and below...