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Comment by stblack | Hacker News Reader

Wow, there isn't much love in the comments below that post on dropbox.com. I find this is surprising to a point.

I love Dropbox, and I use it in exotic ways. That said, I don't "get" why Dropbox wants to be involved with my photos. I've balked at this, and I am surprised that Dropbox seems to be over-pushing in this direction.

Someone once said that 'Dropbox does only one thing, and it does that one thing VERY well'. I fear that this fixation on photos may be the juncture where Dropbox lost its focus, and ultimately loses the game.

As a succinct commenter posted on Dropbox.com: 'I don't need to post photos to Dropbox'.

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I think what's so great about Dropbox is that they don't really have a focus. They do synchronization, and they're superb at it.

It seems to me that Dropbox is trying to change how customers perceive them and that managing photos is just the first step. Until recently, I think they've largely been viewed as a handy service to share files quickly between friends and across devices. There are a certainly a lot of exotic use cases for their product, and some other commenters have touched on specific ones, but the average person doesn't take advantage of them (or have them). If Dropbox can position itself as a base to store and share photos, videos, music, etc (notice the range of sharing options in the top right of the iPad in the blog post) they can give users peace of mind and easy access to content that is now strewn across several services and not carefully curated in other storage solutions.

I hated that dropbox wanted to sync my photos. "Oh no, there goes some of my quota" I thought. But I was lazy and didn't turn off the feature and now wonder how I got along without it. Take a picture and like magic it's on my computer.

So now I get it, but I really resisted it and am not sure how Dropbox can over come this singular messaging problem.

Fair enough, although I actually love that it wants my photos; I let it have them off my main (Android) phone but not from any other devices. As soon as I walk in the door at home my pics are on my PC, with no effort at all. Recently when the SD card in my phone went bad for some reason it meant I hadn't lost anything at all. It works very well indeed.

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