Soon after Box.net announced a hefty free storage space of 50 GB for all Android users, in comes the reply from Dropbox.

Now you can automatically upload photos and videos to your Dropbox account from Android, without having to manually upload the files from the app or use a USB data cable to transfer the file to your computer. The moment you click a photo or shoot a video, it is saved in the DCIM folder of your Android SD card. The new Android app of Dropbox will keep an eye on this folder and as soon as a new file is saved or copied to the gallery folder, it will be uploaded to “Camera uploads” -a new folder within your Dropbox account. Neat!

The result is that all your photos and videos will automatically download to your computer’s hard drive, the next time you run the Dropbox desktop client. And since Dropbox works on any platform and lets you access all your files from a web based interface, you can access your camera photos from just about anywhere, any computer!

Here is how automatic photos uploads in Dropbox Android app works:

You won’t have to worry about mobile data usage bills, as the app lets you choose whether you want the automatic uploads to work in Wi-Fi only or when connected to a 3G mobile network.  As of now, this feature has been introduced for Android only, while iOS support is a work in progress.

You can always turn off camera upload of Dropbox, just go to the app preferences and hit the “Turn off Camera Upload” button. There is another option that lets you choose whether you want to use specific files for data plan and specific files for Wi-Fi and home wireless network. For example, I would choose “Images” only for mobile data plan and all files for the Wi-Fi connection.

Automatic Uploads In Dropbox And Instant Uploads In Google Plus – The Differences.

Instant upload of photos is already a core Google Plus feature. But Dropbox has gone the extra mile and have added two features which makes it stand apart from the Google Plus app.

First, automatic photos uploads from Android uploads the full sized version of the image, so you always get the exact picture quality across all your devices (after sync). No downscaling, cropping or compromise with the quality of your photo. Second and most importantly, Dropbox will also provide you the option to upload photos to your Dropbox account, when you plug in a camera or an external SD card into your computer. Dropbox wants to make life easy for users who need a central place for all their photos and videos and this update proves it.

Get More Free Space On Dropbox – Enable Automatic Uploads On Android

While features are always welcomed, the need for more free space never ends. Time and again, Dropbox have campaigned the “get more free space” thing and this time it’s no different from their previous marketing efforts.

When you enable automatic uploads of photos in the new Dropbox app for Android, Dropbox will automatically bump your storage space by 500 MB.  If by any chance you run out of space, Dropbox will provide you up to 3 GB of free space, which is limited to automatic uploads of photos and videos only.

Here are a few more reasons why enabling automatic uploads of photos makes sense:

1. Photos are precious memories and you don’t want to loose them no matter what happens. With Dropbox, all your photos are safely backed up to the cloud, automatically!

2. Once your photos are uploaded via the camera upload feature, Dropbox will automatically rename the image file and add the current date in the file name. This is useful, as you can quickly re-collect the exact date when a photo was taken.

3. Camera uploads won’t overwrite or re-upload your photos, if you rename or delete files from your Android gallery. Once a photo is uploaded and backed up to your Dropbox account, it will never be uploaded again, no matter how many copies of the same photo you have in the Android SD card.

4. Dropbox will never delete files from your phone, camera, SD card or computer, you will have to manually delete photos and sync all the devices to remove the trace of an image.

Another feature I am dying to see is the ability to remotely upload large files to my own Dropbox account, without having to install the desktop client or use the web uploader. I hope they will add this feature soon.

Automatic uploads of photos and videos is also being tested for Windows platform, grab an experimental build from this page at Dropbox forums and give this a spin!

Related: Best Apps for Dropbox which are worth using.