Many of you were around for last year’s Dropquest, where we sent y’all on a magical journey through Dropbox and the interwebs. Wordokus were solved, music puzzles were deciphered, origami cranes were folded, and dragons were slain. All in all, nearly half a million Dropquesters were rewarded for their craftiness, skill, and effort. That was well over a year ago, and since then we’ve been holding our cards and toiling away to craft a Dropquest successor worthy of the first.

That being said, we’ve got something to say about the Dropquest landing next weekend:

It’s back.

It’s harder.

It’s epic-er.

If you’re experiencing Dropquest for the first time, or if you’re a veteran needing a recap, here’s the scoop:

What is Dropquest? Dropquest is a multi-step scavenger hunt that has you solve a series of puzzles (inspired by the likes of MIT’s Mystery Hunt or Notpron [though not nearly as time/effort-consuming]). Everyone who completes Dropquest will get at least 1 GB of extra free space, even if you participated last year. Also, everyone starts at the same time, but the questers who finish the soonest get additional amazing prizes.

1st place (1) Dropbox employee hoodie, LIMITED EDITION Dropbox Hack Week t-shirt, Dropbox drawing signed by the entire Dropbox team, invitation to help write the next Dropquest, 100 GB for life
2nd place (10) Dropbox employee hoodie, Dropbox t-shirt, 20 GB for life
3rd place (15) Dropbox t-shirt, 5 GB for life
4th place (50) 2 GB for life
5th place (100) 1 GB for life

Any rules? This year, we won’t tolerate use of our support, forums, or blog for Dropquest hints or answers — our wonderful mods and support team would really appreciate it. In fact, you’ll probably get disqualified if we catch you doing this.

When is it? Dropquest starts Saturday, May 12, at 10AM PST (17:00 GMT). Don’t be late.

To get started, head here

(this link won’t work until Dropquest is ready)

Other questions:

Wait, did you say harder? Yes indeed! We’ve got a whole trove of puzzles that will require a discerning eye and tons of creativity to solve, and many of this year’s puzzles will require you to go several layers deep (*cue Inception horns*). Feel free to grab a friend (last year’s winners Veronica and Evonne would definitely encourage you to do so!), but just be aware that one key doesn’t fit every door this year…

Woah, it’s WAY too hard! After Dropquest has been out for a while, we’ll periodically release hints for each step to help you guys out. Use these at your own risk.

How long will Dropquest take? To be honest, we don’t know! There are a bunch of factors that dynamically shift while Dropquest is running, so it’s pretty hard to tell. Last year Dropquest was finished in a little under 2 hours, but the Black-ops team doubts that it’ll be solved in under 5 hours this year — feel free to prove us wrong .

Will I need any special tools? Most if not all of this year’s puzzles can be solved using your internet browser and pencil + paper. While not necessary, we highly suggest downloading and installing the Dropbox desktop application. Several puzzles take place within your Dropbox, and installing will make your life much easier. There won’t be any need for a printer this time (sorry origami enthusiasts!)

What if I win free space? Aside from that being awesome, you should know that your current account type (e.g., Basic, Pro 50, Pro 100) won’t change. Your free space is just for you, so you can’t give it to anyone else or sell it. As always, using Dropbox is subject to our Terms of Service and other terms. Check them out at http://www.dropbox.com/terms.

What’s the story behind Dropquest? Dropquest is written and produced by a two-man cell of the Black-ops Team, and is the result of Dropbox’s very sacred Hack Week, where employees get a full week to work on any project they’d like no matter how technical or random. There are plans to produce a new Quest for every subsequent Hack Week. To learn more about why this is truly an incredible place to work, visit our jobs page.

Remember back in February, we announced a whole set of features to make it easy to bring all your photos and videos together in one place? Well since then, lots of folks have been using our Android app to automatically upload mobile pictures of their vacation and videos of their dog — we’ve even heard tales of Dropbox saving the day when phones completely died!

Today we’re ready to tell the second part in our photos story: now with Dropbox you can automatically upload from just about any camera, tablet, SD card or smartphone — pretty much anything that takes photos or videos! Plus, you can view your uploaded pictures on the web from our spiffy new Photos page!

Getting pictures off your camera has always been a huge pain. So we put our heads down and worked worked worked to ensure that automatic upload would play nicely with anything that might have a photo or video on it. With the newest version for Mac or Windows, you can just plug your camera, phone, or SD card into your computer and with a few clicks of the mouse all your photos and videos are in your Dropbox!

Automatic uploading from the desktop is designed to work perfectly with the Dropbox Android app. Your photos are copied from your camera to your Dropbox and uploaded, in full-quality and at their original size, to your private Camera Uploads folder. As your photos upload, you can access them from anywhere and move and share them as you see fit.

On the web, we’ve made the pictures you’ve uploaded shine on our new Photos page, with nice large thumbnails, grouped by month. You can hover over each to find the date, or click to see them full-size and then download or share them with a link.

You’re probably thinking “But my photos are large, won’t automatic uploading eat up all my Dropbox space?” We’ve got you covered. Don’t forget, we’ll give you 500 MB of Dropbox space for your first automatic upload. As you take and upload more photos and videos, you can earn up to 3 GB extra, for free.

So go ahead, download the new version (codename: Phoenix Down) and save all your memories in your Dropbox! (And stay tuned for Part III…)

We’re super excited to announce a whole new way to share: now you can send a link to the files or folders in your Dropbox!

Sharing with friends and family is easy! Once you’ve saved that video of your niece’s birthday party to Dropbox, just make a link to send to grandma and she can simply watch online — no download required. This saves you the hassle of having to re-upload or attach it to an email.

Anyone with the link gets access to a snazzy page where they can view (but not edit) your stuff. Our gallery pages give your photos, videos, and even docs the gorgeous, full-browser view they deserve. This means that people who follow your link can see pictures, look at presentations, and watch home videos without having to download and open them separately.

But just in case a friend wants to save that picture or PDF for later, they can choose to either download it or save it straight to their Dropbox.

Here are some great ways to use this new instant sharing feature:

• Families can send vacation photos and videos just moments after getting home.
• Companies with Dropbox for Teams can send presentations to clients who might not use Dropbox, and share materials with employees on their first day.
• Teachers can quickly distribute problem sets and exams through links, and students can save them to their own Dropbox with a click.

How it works:
We’ve made it easy to share your stuff from the web, your computer, or mobile device:

www.dropbox.com

desktop

mobile

Don’t know when to use links instead of shared folders? Here’s our advice: if multiple people need to edit the same set of stuff, a shared folder is best. If not, then links are the way to go! Linking is much faster, and it’s also the best way to make your content shine on the web.

Check out our links page to learn more.

We’ve have been refining this feature in beta since last year, and now that we’re ready to roll it out to everyone, we’d like to thank all the Dropbox for Teams users who shared their feedback. And a special shout-out to our friends on the Dropbox forums. We have lots more on the way, so stay tuned!

Wanna see something awesome? If you use Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, you can now upload files by dragging them from your desktop onto the Dropbox website. After Dropbox detects the upload, it’ll work its magic to get your stuff wherever you need it. This is just a small step toward giving you a simpler (and more fun!) dropbox.com.

Enjoy!

Hey everyone!

Today, we’re really happy to announce that we’ve doubled the amount of free space you get for inviting friends to Dropbox!

How much space is that, exactly? For every friend you invite that installs Dropbox, you’ll both get 500 MB of free space. If you’ve got a free account, you can invite up to 32 people for a whopping total of 16 GB of extra space. Pro accounts now earn 1 GB per referral, for a total of 32 GB of extra space. Have you already invited a bunch of people? Don’t worry. Within a few days, you’ll get full credit for every referral that’s already been completed. Boom!

Once upon a time, we noticed that Dropbox spread fastest via word of mouth. We’ve always believed that sharing is caring, so we rolled out this referral program to make recommending Dropbox an even sweeter deal. Back then, we gave out only 250 MB per invite. Then we doubled the space for students for inviting friends, and they liked it so much we decided to give it to everyone!

Start referring your friends now.

Here’s a quick guide to getting the word out:

• Import your email contacts – After you import your contacts, you can select which friends, family and coworkers to invite. In case you miss someone, you can always type in their email address. This also makes it super easy to share folders with them later.

• Post to Facebook and Twitter – This lets you invite all your friends in one go.

• Share your unique referral link – Anyone who installs Dropbox with your link will count toward your referrals. Use the link in emails, blogs, or whatever you’d like. Get creative!

Once you’ve invited your friends, you can check in on your referral status here, and encourage them to download and start using Dropbox.

Thanks for spreading the Dropbox love!

Early this March, the Dropbox office was transformed into a giant open workshop.

We’re always working hard to make Dropbox better, and we often forget to take a step back and think about all the cool ideas left untapped. Hack week is a dedicated week for members and friends of the team to work on whatever they want. Over the course of Hack Week, some people built new experimental features for Dropbox, others worked on new open source projects, and a handful jammed on completely random ideas.

So what exactly does “hack” mean? The word definitely has a negative connotation of breaking into computer systems or doing other illegal things. But here, “hack” means being clever and creative despite tight constraints.

And that’s the spirit of Hack Week. It’s a great time to try something new and work with new people. It’s also a great time to tackle an ambitious project and explore the limits of what we’re able to do without deadlines or restrictions.

Hack Week is also a party! Throughout the week, volunteers from all over the company also hosted and planned events. We held our second ping pong tournament, a StarCraft coaching tournament, a lock-picking seminar, a foosball tournament, Dropbox jeopardy, Python classes, and more.

You can find more pictures here.

At the end of Hack Week, we held a closing ceremony where everyone presented their projects. We chose the most distinctive projects to win our Hack Week awards:

• Shrewd: Tony Grue (Automatic Interview Scheduler)

Music: “We Will Learn” by Beat Culture, “Adrift (Shigeto’s Adrift A Dream Remix)” by Tycho

Hey everyone!

Dropbox is growing really fast! The team was at 30 people last March, and today sees us just barely over 100. But words can’t describe how excited we are about the newest addition to the Dropbox family: the Cove team.

Akhil Wable will add some engineering experience and muscle to the team. Akhil was one of the architects of Facebook’s search system, and built much of their core infrastructure for storing a graph database. You’ve probably used a lot of his work if you’ve used Facebook Share or Notes.

Joshua Jenkins provides some much-needed relief to Dropbox’s design team, and was Cove’s sole designer. Josh has the unique distinction of being the only designer (out of around 20) to pass Cove’s insanely difficult hiring process.

Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi have been amazing advisors and friends to us the past couple years, and we’re thrilled to make the gig official. Aditya and Ruchi both have legendary histories at Facebook (they were around when it was upstairs from a Chinese restaurant), and their experience working on products used by hundreds of millions of people will prove invaluable at Dropbox. The two of them will be taking up senior roles here, and we’re stoked to have them aboard.

So, what exactly is Cove, and how does it play with Dropbox? Cove has developed great tools for sharing and indexing your stuff across groups of people. Sound familiar? Seeing as our vision is the same and both teams are driven to build stuff that just works, joining forces was a no-brainer. It also doesn’t hurt that Cove’s backend infrastructure plays so nicely with Dropbox.

We think that this is the beginning of something really special at Dropbox; and given how ambitious our newest projects are, Cove couldn’t have shown up at a better time. Please help us welcome Cove to the team!

P.S. – We’re always hiring!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been quietly rolling out a major redesign of the Dropbox website. Today we turned it up to 11, and anyone who signs into dropbox.com will see a simpler, more powerful, and more beautiful web experience. Here’s what we came up with:

A focus on the stuff you care about

One of our main goals was to slim down dropbox.com and focus on the star of the page: your stuff. We’ve put all the tools you need at your fingertips, but only when you need them.

The new action bar at the top of the screen does it all. Think of it as a multi-tool that adjusts to your needs. You can use it to sort your files by name, date, size, and type. Or, if you select a file or folder, the bar will change to let you perform a variety of actions on your selection.

A new right-click menu includes these actions as well.

Better photos experience

We know how much Dropbox users love their photos and videos, but until now it’s been too hard to view your images on the website. We’ve built in a simple and gorgeous photo viewer that lets you use your entire screen to view your pictures or videos.

We’ve also added thumbnails for image and video files (Photoshop and Illustrator too!) so you can get a preview of your stuff without needing to open or download it. This way, you’ll always know what IMG5083.JPG or final2.PSD actually looks like, and which video to share with grandma.

Faster, happier, more productive

It’s way faster and easier to get stuff done using the new site. Our new drag-and-drop makes moving stuff as easy as on your desktop. We’ve also replaced the checkboxes on the page with better multiple file selection (click-dragging works!). And for all you power users out there, we’ve added keyboard shortcuts to make mouseless browsing a breeze — just hit ‘?’ for a full list.

We’ve also leveled up Dropbox search. Not only does it live right in the file browser, but it also instantly fetches results as you type!

This is only the first step — you can expect a lot more cool stuff in the next few months, so stay tuned!

You’ve been there. After a long night out, you left your phone in the cab. Or maybe you went canoeing and sent your camera for a swim. Buying a new one hurts, but the worst part is that all those photos and videos are long gone. Even when nothing bad happens, it’s no fun having to track down photos spread across your computers, your PowerShot, or that old cracked phone.

We’re excited to share a simple new way to help you bring all your photos and videos together in one place. It doesn’t matter what kind of camera or phone you have. And since this one place is in Dropbox, you can have all your photos and videos with you wherever you are. Here’s the scoop:

Starting today for Android, and coming soon for iOS, the Dropbox mobile apps can automatically upload your photos and videos to Dropbox using Wi-Fi or your data plan. They’re all uploaded at original size and full quality, and saved to a private folder in your Dropbox called Camera Uploads where they’re ready to view or share. Here’s a shot of the Android app in action:

Meanwhile, the new version of our Windows and Mac desktop apps can automatically upload from just about any camera, smartphone, tablet, or SD card you connect to your computer. If you’ve got great shots stranded on your Coolpix or piling up on your Canon 5D, all you’ve got to do is plug it in. We’re putting these apps through their final paces now — check here if you want to help get the kinks out!

Once your photos have been automatically uploaded to Dropbox, you’ll be able to check them out using a sneak peek of our new website. The new dropbox.com makes it way more fun and easy to flip through your pictures, where they’ll be as big and beautiful as your screen allows.

We’re really excited about these new features, and we think you’ll like them. To help you get started saving your photos, we’ll give you 500 MB of Dropbox space for your first automatic upload. As you take more photos and videos, you can use this feature to automatically upload up to a total of 3 GB extra for free.

We want to give a huge shoutout to our friends on the forums who helped us test these features. Thanks everyone!

To get started with the new Android app, head over to the Market now!

Hi Dropboxers,

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether we adhere to the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework and the US-Swiss Safe Harbor Framework. As of today, we’re happy to say that the answer is “yes.” We’ve certified that we comply with these safe harbors and updated our Privacy Policy accordingly. You can view the changes here.

During this process, we realized we could make our Privacy Policy more clear in several areas:

Referrals/Sharing: Our new Privacy Policy notes that we send out emails when you refer people to Dropbox. It also spells out that we may receive third-party information like email addresses when you share content with others or refer them to Dropbox.

Geo-location Information: In our current Privacy Policy, we let you know that photos you upload to Dropbox might contain location information recorded by your camera. We’ve updated our Privacy Policy to clarify that videos you send us might already have that information in them as well.

Third Party Websites: Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that when you click a link on the Dropbox website and visit a different site, the privacy policy for the other site may govern your activity there.

These changes will take effect on March 15, 2012, but the safe harbor protections are effective today.