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Forum Discussion
SP6
3 years agoExplorer | Level 4
Re: API v2: Simple image gallery on my website using dropbox
I can't find any php sample code to help understand how to call these methods documented in the API I'd really love to use this thumbnail feature and I have the dropbox dependencies installed but can't figure out how to call any of the methods.
- SP6Explorer | Level 4
Its upsetting that even with the API (which is poorly documented and doesn't show sample code for PHP the most common programming language for websites) we can't create a gallery on our own website and get a list of image urls from a dropbox folder to use??
The dropbox UI is heavily branded to dropbox it's look completely breaks most brands changing the customer experience.
Every answer I've looked at has a response that says "Dropbox can't do <<insert reasonable simple task here>>" while people are constantly finding work arounds showing it's possible but dropbox doesn't care what their customers need. Yes you can view a folder as a gallery but the only way I've seen is to copy all the files from a gallery one by one or by using a parser to get the urls of every image. Then make a gallery on your website that uses those urls. I know for sure Dropbox has tools to do this but the documentation is impossible to understand for most people.
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
Thanks for writing in, and for the feedback.
I understand you're interested in making a photo gallery on your web site. Dropbox does offer the Dropbox Embedder which can display a folder of photos via a shared link to the folder, but it doesn't offer custom branding. I'll pass that along as a feature request, but I can't promise if or when that might be implemented.
Alternatively, Dropbox also offers an API you can use to build a more custom integration. Dropbox doesn't offer examples for that in PHP in particular, but the HTTP documentation has examples shown in curl which you can translate that for whatever platform you need. And for prototyping and trying out specific API calls, the API v2 Explorer can be helpful. It can even show you how the request would be formatted in multiple contexts, such as in Python or raw HTTP, if you click "Show Code".
For example, you can find the documentation for /2/files/get_thumbnail_batch here, and the API v2 Explorer page for it here. Note that Dropbox API thumbnail endpoints return the thumbnails as data directly in the response, not as URLs.
Also, while Dropbox doesn't offer an SDK for PHP, there are some third party libraries that may be useful. If you choose to use a third party library, refer to its documentation for instructions on how to use it. Note that as third party libraries are not made by Dropbox, we cannot provide support for them.
If you run in to any issues with the Embedder or API feel free to share the details and we'll be happy to help however possible.
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