DropSnap

Summary

One of the great things about the advent of the smartphone: people are taking more and more photos, seeing as these little devices have made snapping a few interesting shots that much easier. Still, the age old problem persists—once you’ve taken the picture the hunt for the USB cable commences, seeing as you’ll most likely want to edit your photos on your computer.

How to eradicate the cable from our lives forever? With a service such as Dropbox, a sort of online hard drive that many of you will already be familiar with.
While an Android app version of Dropbox exists, it doesn’t have a feature that enables users to upload photos to their cloud—which is where DropSnap comes into play!

Please note that this is a review of the pro version of DropSnap.
 

Test device: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
Android version: 4.0.2
Mods: Root

DropSnap combs through the SD card searching for photos and videos, which it uploads directly after they have been taken. In order for this to work out a few rules must be set up.

First things first: log in using your Dropbox account. You will then be able to access DropSnap’s main menu. Hit ‘Manage Rules’ before you do anything else. The rules will be set to ‘default’ until you make adjustments. Change the settings to suit your personal preferences and set up a registry in which the app should search for new photos, and to which Dropbox folder photos should be uploaded to.

There are a few other options, such as uploading screenshots. I made an extra Dropbox folder for screenshots, which I have found to be very useful seeing as I often take screenshots for our AndroidPIT app reviews.
DropSnap has really made my life a little bit easier in that sense. I take a few screenshots and as I’m writing up a review the images appear on the computer, ready to be posted. Fabulous.

Another possible settings option is syncing with WiFi, which – to my mind at least – makes the most sense. Automatic syncing can also be deactivated should you prefer to do so manually.

What’s missing: a widget that lets you sync, and a setting for every rule that allows you to determine whether uploading should only occur via WiFi. Those two functions would be rad.

Bottom line:
Overall we are quite satisfied with DropSnap. Once it’s been set up it’s very fluid and does exactly what it promises to do. Storing photos in a cloud is an extra security and makes managing photo albums that much easier.
 

One major drawback when it comes to DropSnap is that it isn’t very newbie-friendly. There are no tutorials to help users find their way around the application, and the set up for files is not as user-friendly as it could be. For instance, rather than display a quick text for the function ‘switch to previous folder’ the application simply displays ‘../’, which people who have never dealt with operating system prompts won’t understand, at least not straight away.

That being said, once you’ve figured the app out (something you will only need to do once) it runs very smoothly in the background and you won’t have to deal with it any longer.
 

DropSnap is ultra fast. The app starts uploading an image as soon as it’s been taken; the amount of time it will take for the photo to upload is contingent on the internet connection that is provided.

DropSnap is also very stabile and performed well throughout our test runs.
 

DropSnap can be downloaded for free, but when using the free version you will have confirm a notification every time you want to upload a photo. The pro version, which I’ve tested for you today, is available for EUR2,79, which is reasonable.