Importing Event Photos From Google Drive or Dropbox
TIME&SPACE · Photographer's Edge
A photographer's photos often sit in a cloud folder before they ever touch TIME&SPACE. Instead of downloading them to a laptop and re-uploading, the cloud importer pulls them in directly from Google Drive or Dropbox, in the same formats a direct upload accepts.
Importing Event Photos From Google Drive or Dropbox
In short: TIME&SPACE can import photos directly from a Google Drive folder or a Dropbox selection, without a detour through a laptop's download folder. It sits next to direct upload as a second way in, not a replacement for it, and it accepts the same image formats either way.
A shoot rarely lands straight on the device running TIME&SPACE. More often it lands in a cloud folder first: a Google Drive the whole crew shares, or a Dropbox link an editor sends over once a first pass is done. The usual next step, download everything locally and then upload it again, doubles the transfer and the wait for no real reason. The cloud importer removes that step.
How it works
From an event's photo upload screen, a photographer picks Google Drive or Dropbox instead of selecting local files. Google Drive opens the native Google Picker, so a folder is browsed and selected exactly as it would be inside Drive itself. Dropbox opens its own chooser the same way. Either one hands back the files, and TIME&SPACE downloads and processes them server-side: the same finalize step a direct upload goes through, the same face-recognition indexing afterward.
Supported formats are identical across both import paths and direct upload: JPEG, PNG, HEIC, HEIF, WebP and TIFF. A folder of iPhone HEIC files imports exactly as cleanly as a folder of JPEGs from a mirrorless camera.
Why two cloud providers, and why it matters which one
Dropbox import has no dependency beyond Dropbox's own chooser. Google Drive import is server-side, which means it is reading the file from Drive on a photographer's behalf rather than just picking a link, and that needs real authorization, not only a picker. Practically, this only matters if a very large import ever fails outright: Dropbox is the fallback path with the fewest moving parts, so it is worth trying if a Drive import stalls on an unusually large folder.
When to use it over a direct upload
Direct upload stays the simplest option when the photos are already local, on the same device doing the uploading. The cloud import earns its place whenever the fastest route to the photos is a link rather than a local file: a second photographer dropped a folder into a shared Drive, a culling pass finished in Dropbox, or an editor delivered a set remotely and the organiser wants it live without routing it through anyone's downloads folder first.
What doesn't change
Imported photos go through the identical pipeline as a direct upload from that point on: the same visibility settings per photo, the same face-recognition indexing, the same place in the event's gallery. The import method is only how the files arrive, never a separate kind of photo.
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