Dropbox

I've been trying to think of a way to easily add photos to this blog that I've taken on my Android phone. My initial workaround was to upload photos to the phone Facebook app, then open web Facebook on the iPad, save them to the iPad camera roll, then use the Blogger app to get them onto the blog. It works, but it's a bit of a clunky way to do things and I want to improve it now rather than wait for whichever of the 23 Things will show me a better way, so I thought of using Dropbox.

Good points about Dropbox: it was easy to install on both my phone and the iPad. Also the layout and functionality on the iPad is intuitive, but...

Bad points: the layout and functionality on an Android device is not easy to work out! As soon as I installed Dropbox on my phone it started adding all of my photos to itself which was very frustrating because I only wanted a small number of them in a Dropbox folder. I finally (by the standard approach of pressing every available option) discovered that on several, but not all, of the screens I can press the menu button on the phone to pull up a menu including 'settings' then I could 'turn off camera upload'.

I then had to get the photos I wanted (which it had uploaded by that time) into a folder...hang on, this is where it gets complicated. In order to create the folder I used the iPad web browser to log in to my Dropbox account. The folder then showed on my phone, I touched the folder name then used the phone menu button to access the upload option, then ticked the photos I wanted.

From that point on it was easy - the photos automatically appeared in the Dropbox folder of the same name on the iPad, and from there I saved the ones I wanted to the camera roll, then used the Blogger app to write this and add the photos below...

(Oh, but because the Blogger app only has basic functionality I then had to log in to my blog using the iPad web browser and edit this post so I could add the link to Dropbox in the first paragraph. Maybe I should resort to using a proper computer!)