Migrating from Dropbox to Apple Photos

Photo by Mylene Tremoyet on Unsplash

TL;DR

Import photos from Dropbox into Apple Photos, keeping their original dates. Skip straight to the solution.

Motivation

I’ve long been a fan of Dropbox, but when it comes to browsing my photos, it’s hard to defend sticking with them lately. Originally I wanted a paid solution that isn’t bound to a specific OS. Dropbox is still that. But my main use for it is keeping photos backed up, and in reality, I use iOS and macOS on a regular basis and the iCloud/Photos integration into them is simply astounding. At a certain point, I stopped backing photos up to Dropbox and started paying for iCloud.

Now, I’m stuck with years of my past in Dropbox, and the following years in iCloud. While the Apple Photos experience is fast, streamlined, deeply integrated, easily searchable, can recognize faces and pull up photos from any time, the experience with Dropbox is quite the opposite. The web app is slow, heavy, and what broke me — if you want a photo from more than a few months ago, go make coffee. You have 30 minutes of endless scrolling to do. No advanced search, no ability to jump to a specific year, no face recognition.

Requirements

I don’t want to just move photos from one place to another. I want this migration to keep the original dates intact, and for the photos to appear in my Photos stream, so they are searchable and processed for face recognition.

This rules out iCloud drive or dragging photos into the Photos app.

Solution

Thankfully, if the setup is right, the Photos app has an inbuilt import function that will do what we need, provided we have the entire photo library synced locally (i.e. to your Mac) with the correct dates.

So the steps are:

1. Install the Dropbox app on your Mac.
2. Sync all the photos and videos you want to be transferred to your Mac.
3. Make sure they are really downloaded as opposed to on-demand Smart Sync. With the folder selected, in the Dropbox Finder menu, choose “Make available offline”.
4. Wait for all the photos to sync to your hard drive. This can take a while (my camera uploads folder was ~525GB).
5. In Photos, click File → Import. Choose the entire folder. Alternatively you can just drag and drop photos on the Photos app for the same effect.
6. Wait for the import to finish. Your photos will be imported with the original date and time they were created.

In Finder, highlight the Camera Uploads folder within your Dropbox folder, and sync it to your hard drive

In Photos, import the downloaded photos to your library

I was also looking for an automated solution that will allow me to skip all these hours of downloading and then uploading, but as of writing this, I haven’t found one. If you happen to stumble onto one, drop me a line.