Does anyone understand Windows 8 and Dropbox?

I have been taking digital photographs since 2003 and I now have a very large collection on my hard drive, which has been successfully transferred from laptop to laptop as I have replaced them. I have just bought a new laptop and I have transferred my photos to It. My previous and current laptops run Windows 8.1.

This time there seems to be a problem. While the majority of the photos I can view, there are some that I can only see the filename not the picture. When I go into the properties of a photo that won’t display and then go to permissions it says it is unable to display the current owner. I click on change and a dialogue box comes up headed Select User Or Group. I enter the object name to select (in this case Administrator), then click check name, and it inserts my full administrator name. I click on save and exit, but when I go back I find that it has reverted to its original blank state. In permissions all principals have full control. How do I view these photos?

Meanwhile, Dropbox has been diligently copying my photos into itself, and I can view all my photos… Aha I thought, this could be my salvation. I just need to move or copy the photos in Dropbox onto my hard drive. Now I would have thought that this would be standard practice, but it appears I am wrong. There is nothing, as far as I can see, in Dropbox’s help that tells you how to move or copy files to outside Dropbox. So then I googled the problem. I have discovered that there seem to be two variations of Dropbox: one that appears in your web browser, and one that appears in Windows Explorer. No one seems to know how to move or copy photos out of the web browser but apparently it is possible to do it in Explorer. But – although there is a photos folder, none of my photos are in it. Why that is, I have absolutely no idea. I don’t understand what the difference is between the two forms of Dropbox

Can anyone enlighten me about these two problems?

The way dropbox works is everything that you put in the Dropbox folder on your hard drive is backed up to the cloud, and you can view it online. Also, any changes to the files on your hard-drive will be reflected on the version on the cloud. If you install the Dropbox software on your new laptop, and log-in with the same account, it should download everything from the cloud to the Dropbox folder on your new laptop. Any photos you can see online should be downloaded to the equivalent folder on your harddrive.

Photos that are automatically transferred to Dropbox may be in the Camera Uploads folder. I think the Photos folder allows you to share the photos online, you can put photos in any folder you want. If you can find the photos online, once you’ve installed Dropbox they should be in the corresponding sub-folder of the Dropbox folder.

The two types of dropbox are just two parts of the same thing. The version on windows explorer are the files on your hard drive, and the version through the web browser is accessing the files on the cloud, through the web. Dropbox will sync up the two versions, so they contain the same files. It might take a while if you have a lot of photos. The Dropbox folder should be in your Favorites in Windows Explorer, if you have Dropbox installed.

Just install the full Dropbox application. Then everything will show up in Windows Explorer.