

Your photos, simplified (Part II) - jackyolk
http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=1165

======
dustingetz
afaict this is android only. took me about 10 minutes to figure it out, they
were super sneaky with the wording of their press release. thanks for wasting
my time :(

~~~
gduffy
Before complaining, you must ask the quintessential iOS development question:
"is there an allowed API to accomplish it?"

The Android corollary is: "Does it work on my ARMv6 Android 2.1 toaster? And
can it use the hardware acceleration features provided by Qualcomm
processors?"

~~~
Timothee
As far as I know, the answer to your first question is "yes". (I haven't
tested it myself but I have seen it used in apps to display a custom photo
picker. E.g. in Camera+)

See documentation for ALAssetsLibrary:
[http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/Assets...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/AssetsLibrary/Reference/ALAssetsLibrary_Class/Reference/Reference.html)

"An instance of ALAssetsLibrary provides access to the videos and photos that
are under the control of the Photos application.

The library includes those that are in the Saved Photos album, those coming
from iTunes, and those that were directly imported into the device. You use it
to retrieve the list of all asset groups and to save images and videos into
the Saved Photos album."

~~~
gduffy
Can you do it automatically whenever the iPhone camera app takes a picture?

~~~
Timothee
Good point, and most likely not.

I'm not very familiar with the background process APIs, but from my
understanding of it, I'd be surprised if you were able to do that. In my
comment I was mostly thinking of automatic upload as the user uses the app
itself: opens Dropbox to check out a document and it automatically gets the
new pictures without the user having to remember to do it.

------
lukeholder
This is nice, but i really want to hear from them about drive. In particular -
their response in pricing.

The switching cost is so low, and my subscription to dropbox is up in 2 days.

------
peter_l_downs
I recently purchased an android phone (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) and I noticed
this happening as early as this Tuesday (the 24th). I was wondering why that
was happening... cool!

