Saving Files to Dropbox From Your iPhone or iPad

Dropbox is a great resource for saving, archiving and sharing files with family, friends and business colleagues. Accounts start at $0, so there's really no reason for everyone not to have one. I use my Dropbox account heavily on a daily basis and would recommend it to everyone.

Historically, the challenge with Dropbox is saving files to your account from your iPhone or iPad. Sure, it's easy to retrieve and view (and even edit) files from your Dropbox, but saving back to your account is as whole different story. That changed yesterday with the latest version of Dropbox for iOS. Saving files to your Dropbox account couldn't be easier now. Here's how it works.

First, we find a file that we want to save to Dropbox. In this case, I have a photo that I want to save to my Dropbox account. Tapping on the action button will present you with a list of actionable options to choose from (Mail, Message, etc.).

Since this is the first time you have saved a file to your Dropbox account from your iOS device, you'll need to enable the Dropbox action option (this is a persistent change, so you only have to do this once). To do this, we tap on the "More..." button on the right side.

This gives us a list of possible actions to enable or disable.

Once the Dropbox option is enabled, we can go back to our action menu and tap on the Dropbox action.

After choosing Dropbox, we will be prompted to choose a location within our Dropbox account to save our file to.

This process works for virtually all documents in most apps in iOS, but there are some apps that's work a little differently. iWork for iOS, for example, requires a slightly different process.

In this example, I have a Keynote document that I want to save to my Dropbox account. To do this, we will open the document, then tap on the action button and choose "Open in Another App" (instinctively, you will want to choose to Send a Copy, but that's won't get you very far with Dropbox).

Next, you will choose the file format to save the file. Lastly, you will choose to "open" the file in Dropbox. When you choose this option, you will be presented with your Dropbox directory structure where you can browse and select the folder you want to save your file to.

Ok, time to stop reading and put this into practice!

Posted on January 25, 2016 and filed under How To, iOS, iPad, iPhone.