Dropbox for Mobile - Dropbox for Beginners (2015)

Dropbox for Beginners (2015)

Dropbox for Mobile

Just like you download Dropbox for your personal computer you can download the official app of Dropbox on your Smartphone as well. The app is free of course and can be used to link your Smartphone with all your other Dropbox-linked devices. So whatever you upload to your Dropbox folder on your computer or another device it will be available on your Smartphone app as well. Using Dropbox app on your Smartphone can become really handy because of the fact that you can view and edit your important documents on the go.

Just like we discussed several tips and tricks that can be used on your personal computer to make the best out of this simple file sharing and synchronizing tool. Here we will discuss a couple of techniques that can be used on your Smartphones to make your life a lot easier and your Dropbox a lot more useful.

Offline Dropbox Access

There’s a feature named “favorite a file” in your Dropbox app which lets you mark your files as your favorite files. This may look like nothing but it is an incredibly useful feature especially for businessmen who travel a lot or for people who go through dark zones a lot (zones with no signal).

By ticking the check box to favorite a file in your Dropbox app you will let your Dropbox app save a copy of your favorite file on your local storage which can then be accessed any time you want. This means that you won’t need internet to view your files from Dropbox. This is quite useful in situations where you camping in a no-service place or you are rushing to your class. In these scenarios you can easily access and read your favorite or important files without worrying about any internet availability.

So make sure to use that functionality whenever you think you might need your files in a place with no internet connectivity.

Saving Pictures and Notes Automatically

We all use our phones to take pictures and notes of important things. Most of the time we want these important things to be available on our computer as well. So rather than taking a picture and then using USB cable to transfer it to your computer why not simply automate the whole method using Dropbox?

Dropbox offers a feature to you their user that lets you save and upload your pictures and videos automatically to your Dropbox. The uploaded pictures and other media, of course, will be synched back to your computer and you can access your files from your computer without doing anything. All you need to do is turn on the “upload to Dropbox” option in your Dropbox app to let your phone automatically upload your photos and videos to Dropbox whenever you connect to internet. This way you will always have your album wherever you want and this will also ensure that you will always have a backup of your pictures on your Dropbox. Along with media you can also use Dropbox to store your quick notes as well. Just simply create a new note and save it in your Dropbox so you can edit and view this note wherever you want. This can be very useful for people who take a lot of notes or people who are used to keeping to-do lists for their daily adventures.

Dropbox simply is an amazing tool to store and quickly review all your media including pictures, videos and music along with your text files which include all types of texts or notes. All of these will be available to all your computers as well as other phones and devices so you won’t ever have to worry about forgetting your important stuff somewhere else.

Dropbox for Social Media Sharing

We all are very fond of social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram etc. Almost everyone these days uses at least one of these social media if not all of them. And by using social media we mean not just contacting your friends and family; it includes posting your pictures and other media to these sites as well. You can use Dropbox to quickly upload anything you want from your phone. You can choose the “Share this file” option in your Dropbox to quickly share your media over any network of your choosing (if you have that app installed on your device). This feature can be proven very useful for Youtubers who can simply select the option of sharing this file to upload their videos on YouTube right from their Dropbox app. This can save a lot of time because you won’t have to connect your device to your personal computer and then copy that file to your computer in order to upload it. You can simply select the option from your Dropbox app.

Storing Your Passwords And Accessing Them Via Dropbox

With the increasing usage of online transactions and social media, many of us feel the need to store our passwords somewhere safe because it’s really hard to remember all of our passwords these days.

If you are one of those people who use their computer for almost every transaction then you must be very familiar with the fact that it’s quite hard for a person to keep in mind all

his/her passwords. Many of us simply use apps or softwares to safely store our passwords. It would be really convenient to be able to access your passwords whenever you want and that is where Dropbox comes in. You can use Keepass to store your passwords in a .kdb file. You can then store this .kdb file in your Dropbox folder so that you can later access these files from your phone. Now you must be thinking how will you be able to open files with .kdb extension? It’s really easy; you need KeePassDroid in your phone to open those .kdb files from Dropbox. Once you install these apps you will be able to download, open and modify your passwords from your .kdb files no matter where you are. Dropbox will sync back and forth between your mobile and desktop environments to make sure that you have the latest version of your passwords. And, of course, you will get the benefits of version history, delete recovery, offline access and of many other features that comes along with Dropbox.

Some Other Cool Tips for Dropbox

Dropbox can be used for several other small things as well. In fact covering all the uses and tips of Dropbox are out of the scope of this book. Here are a couple more tricks that can be used with your Dropbox app to make your android or iPhone much more efficient.

If you are a programmer then you must be really be disappointed by the fact that you can’t code on your phone. Even if you download a programming utility for your phone it will definitely take up a lot of internal space (programming environments can’t be installed on your SD card) which can be a huge issue for people with low internal memory phones. For people who like to code while travelling and don’t want to carry a huge bag, they can use Dropbox to edit and sync their scripts. You will need a text editor to view or edit your scripts on your phone but that can be downloaded a lot easily if compared to a whole coding environment. You use that text editor to edit your scripts and then re-upload them to your Dropbox. When you go home you can easily review your edited scripts without any problem. This method can be used to keep track of your computer while you’re away by using a script along with a screenshot tool running on your computer. The whole detail can be seen in the chapter “Dropbox for pc”.

Along with editing scripts and note taking, you can also combine your Dropbox with any QR code-sending app to share your files with your friends as well. So let’s just suppose you want to share a file with your friend you just simply have long press your file in Dropbox and use your QR code-sending app to share it. Now your friend can use a BarcodeScanner to scan the link you sent your friend. Upon scanning the link you sent your friend your file will automatically start downloading.

We also mentioned the use of a feature named “favorite” in Dropbox which lets you access your important documents even if you are offline. Sometimes your local space can get

quite full which can become a problem in cases where you need all your files without internet connectivity. You use the feature of “export” to copy your important files to your SD card. This feature is great in a sense that it provides a great way of storing your documents so you can access them even if you are offline. This isn’t just a simple feature; you can use this feature to transfer your files from internal memory to your SD card as well. There is also a possibility of using this feature to transfer your data to other devices (using your SD card) in situations where you don’t have access to Wi-Fi. This tiny feature can do a lot of wonders for you if you use it wisely.