moving from dropbox to icloud drive - good Idea?

[pscl]

Hello Folks!

I recently bought an ipad to do most of the light office work in the living room. to make it easier, i thought i could try icloud drive with the 50gb plan to see if its working well without any 3rd party tools. until now i was using dropbox.

now i found out some more or less bad things about icloud drive and hope for some advice:

- I find its really annoying that i have to download EVERY FILE to the device (ipad / iphone) that i open. I mean in dropbox, i could easily browse hundreds of pictures without having to download any of them. This makes browsing pictures a pain in the ass because i have to download them before i open them.

- uploading pictures... i mean.. ok... they want us to use fotostream... but really... if i want to upload some photos to icloud drive via photos on iphone, i cant even add a new folder in this dialog. i have to go to icloud drive and create one, then go back to photos and upload. i mean.. come on... wtf?

am i getting it wrong? maybe this isnt the best workflow for me.


any tips&tricks for me? what kind of cloud space are you using?

 

[chabig]

It's better to keep your photos in the photos app, with iCloud Photos turned on. Then none of the issues you mentioned matter. That's what I do and why I don't use Dropbox for photos at all.

For ordinary documents, iCloud drive is useful if the local storage on your Mac isn't big enough to hold everything at once. Dropbox on the Mac still keeps full copies of everything on the Mac and in the cloud. On iOS, they both work about the same--documents in the cloud have to be downloaded to be worked on, and then they sync. One other use case where Dropbox rules is for very large files, like virtual machines. When Dropbox syncs it only moves the changes back and forth. iCloud sends the whole file.

 

[Brammy]

I am bumping this because I have the same questions. I am paying for 200g of iCloud, and 1tb of Dropbox. I would like to work towards just having one "main" cloud service, but every time I move my critical files out of Dropbox, I end up moving them back in again.

For me, Dropbox has a few advantages over iCloud

• If I do a clean install of macOS, I have found Dropbox is faster at getting my files back down from the cloud. This is an edge case though, since I don't do this a lot.
• Dropbox does selective sync, so I can keep large archive libraries on Dropbox and not take up space on my Mac.
• On iOS, if I pay for Dropbox, I can select folders to be always downloaded so I can access files if I don't have an internet connection.
• Office on iOS plays better with Dropbox than iCloud.

That said, iCloud isn't completely useless:

• It's an all-in-one platform for Apple devices.
• It works pretty damn good now. I have had zero problems with sync or anything, but I did have one time Dropbox had a weird issue and couldn't see any folders on iOS.
• I will be paying for only one service.

For now, I am paying for both services. I finish grad school next April which will negate the need for me using Office on my iPad. I could use Pages for school, but I like to keep things native for the formats the teacher expects deliveables.