PEG 2026/2/17 submission to Dropbox Community:
I have had a Dropbox Plus account for several years. I have the latest version of the Dropbox app (460.2.2) installed on my iPhone with iOS 18.7.1. When I was unable to upgrade to the latest iOS version and when I could no longer backup my iPhone to iCloud, I found that copying photos and videos from my iPhone camera roll to specific folders in Dropbox, deleting those items from my iPhone camera roll, and then deleting all the items in the Recently Deleted folder in my camera roll did not free up storage on my iPhone. I cleared the Dropbox cache on my iPhone and confirmed that I did not have any offline files. However, I did find that the Dropbox Photos folder on my iPhone had copies of all the uploaded files. Consequently, moving photos and videos to the Dropbox cloud did not free up space on my iPhone.
In the iOS Dropbox app, the Photos folder has copies of all the photos that were uploaded to specific folders in the Dropbox cloud. When I delete one of those photos from the Photos folder on the iPhone, the copy in the Dropbox cloud is also deleted!
Note that in the iOS Dropbox app, I had “Camera uploads” “On” with the following pertinent settings: “Upload from” “Videos” (only that folder), “Save HEIC photos as” “JPG”, “Save Live Photos as” “Live Photo”. Though photos should not have been affected, I turned off Camera uploads. I ran the same test with the same result: a photo sent to a specific Dropbox folder appears (in HEIC format) in that Dropbox folder online as well as in the Photos folder in the Dropbox app on my iPhone; deleting the photo from the Photos folder in the iPhone Dropbox app also deletes the photo from the specific Dropbox folder in the cloud.
PictureEcho recommends using the “Free Up Space” option in the iOS Dropbox app to delete the copies of the photos on the iPhone and not on the Dropbox cloud, but I cannot locate that option anywhere in the Dropbox app on my iPhone.
Restarting the Dropbox app does not make a difference. Reinstalling the app including removing all the Dropbox data stored on the iPhone would solve the immediate problem but would not address the bigger issue: as-is Dropbox is only useful for sharing (unannotated) photos and videos that I don’t mind also storing on my iPhone. Since I have a backup service for my (Windows) laptop, without a solution I’ll go back to moving photos and videos from my iPhone to my laptop. This greatly diminishes the justification for paying for a Dropbox Plus account.
The “Free Up Space” option would help but I question the multiple steps required. In iOS select two photos, upload to Dropbox, close the Dropbox upload window, reselect the two photos, delete, open the “Recently deleted” folder (album?) and delete the two photos (or delete all). In the Dropbox app on the iPhone, select “Free Up Space” and then (as needed) delete the cache.
Then there’s the issue of the comments added to a photo in iOS (apparently) not getting stored in Dropbox. In Dropbox online I can view a photo with the iOS HEIC extension and view the basic HEIC metadata, but I cannot view comments added in iOS. I can add comments in Dropbox but presumably those comments are not visible in iOS (or on my Windows laptop) outside of the Dropbox app or website.