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Can't preview photos in Dropbox folder when files are online-only
One of my team members updated to a new computer and now she cannot see any previews for photos that are online only. It is important for our workflow to see the image previews online only becausee we work with thousands of images in our catalogs.
I am on an older Mac but both of us are on the same OS (15.3) and I can see previews no problem. Contacted DB support and they did not fix the issue. Tried a "hard reinstall" as supposed by DB support but did not work. They are not offering any other help which is very disappointing considering how many licenses we pay for.
Anyone else able to fix this issue? Thanks in advance for your help!
In general, online-only files don't contain any data on them, so there shouldn't be any previews for files that are online-only
Err... this is not quite correct. At least, assuming some interpretations of "preview".Thumbnails, which are the mini versions of images you see when browsing in Finder, should show up (modulo bugs).
Usually we do try to provide thumbnails for online-only files - however, there is a known issue on macOS where for (IIRC) users on macOS 14+ (IIRC), but NOT on our File Provider implementation, we're not able to provide thumbnails for online-only files.
Actual previews (e.g. when using the space bar to trigger an expanded view of an image from Finder), are a bit different.
In some ways, those have the opposite problem. For File Provider, using the space bar shortcut will trigger the file to be downloaded in order to show that high-resolution "Preview". Prior to File Provider, and on macOS < 14 (again, IIRC), I believe the way we integrated thumbnails for online only files also provided low-resolution (~256x256) "previews" when you hit space bar on an online-only file, instead of causing the file to be downloaded.
ptorgus, supposing what you mean by "preview" is what I'm calling "thumbnail", I suspect your team member is not using our File Provider implementation, and that's why they're not able to see thumbnails.
If they're eligible, they should be able to go to (dropbox tray menu) -> Preferences -> Sync, and then follow the prompts under "Dropbox folder updates". You can see https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-for-macos-support for more information.
11 Replies
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- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi ptorgus, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
In general, online-only files don't contain any data on them, so there shouldn't be any previews for files that are online-only.
Did you previously have those files on your machine as local, before moving them to online-only?
This will help me to assist further.
I currently have all my images set to be online only and I can see the preview of all of them in my DB desktop folder.
radical_exponentDropbox Engineer
In general, online-only files don't contain any data on them, so there shouldn't be any previews for files that are online-only
Err... this is not quite correct. At least, assuming some interpretations of "preview".Thumbnails, which are the mini versions of images you see when browsing in Finder, should show up (modulo bugs).
Usually we do try to provide thumbnails for online-only files - however, there is a known issue on macOS where for (IIRC) users on macOS 14+ (IIRC), but NOT on our File Provider implementation, we're not able to provide thumbnails for online-only files.
Actual previews (e.g. when using the space bar to trigger an expanded view of an image from Finder), are a bit different.
In some ways, those have the opposite problem. For File Provider, using the space bar shortcut will trigger the file to be downloaded in order to show that high-resolution "Preview". Prior to File Provider, and on macOS < 14 (again, IIRC), I believe the way we integrated thumbnails for online only files also provided low-resolution (~256x256) "previews" when you hit space bar on an online-only file, instead of causing the file to be downloaded.
ptorgus, supposing what you mean by "preview" is what I'm calling "thumbnail", I suspect your team member is not using our File Provider implementation, and that's why they're not able to see thumbnails.
If they're eligible, they should be able to go to (dropbox tray menu) -> Preferences -> Sync, and then follow the prompts under "Dropbox folder updates". You can see https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-for-macos-support for more information.
My team member cannot see them.
Yes, I meant thumbnails, sorry about that. Had tried this before and did not work. DM support said to uninstall this. They will try this again.
radical_exponentthis solution does appear to be working for me, which is a *huge* relief from the years of maddening responses of "try switching your file's state to "offline" to remedy the situation!" from db staff.
So thank you for posting here.
Now, there's the question of Windows. Do we see any relief on the way?- radical_exponent
On the windows side, we definitely have reports of bugs, but we've yet to be able to find a consistent reproduction for the problem. When this occurs on windows, things like restarting the dropbox client or explorer.exe (or the whole machine), tend to resolve things - and given that we don't know a consistent way to get into that borked state, that makes it pretty hard to debug!
One bright spot on the horizon is the updates that are currently rolling out for windows users, to migrate users to the Cloud Files API. In our testing, this API has been more reliable in making sure things like thumbnails and context menus are working. (to be clear, this is a slow rollout - so you won't necessarily see immediate changes)
Gotcha. I'll keep a closer eye on the windows machine and see if there's any consistency. I hear ya.
Cool it sounds like that's a quiet rollout, we won't necessarily see a big switch like we did with File Provider?
The work you guys did with FP on the Mac side, and the fact it completely resolved the issue, is incredible. Hats off to the team.
I'm now hopeful we can begin using Bridge as an asset management solution. It was totally hamstringed by lack of thumb/previews for online db files.I've been waiting for years for Dropbox to solve this problem of thumnail preview of images on Windows for cloud files. I had to start using OneDrive to work on a project with lots of images that needed preview. I use Dropbox as storage and backup still but when I'm actively working on something that needs to preview lots of images, I copy the folder to OneDrive which has no issue with thumbnail preview. Hope Dropbox can really solve this finally. Please let me know when it rolls out. I know lots of people on this forum in the past have been waiting for it for quite a while .
Hi, I'm using Dropbox on Windows 11 Pro, 64 bit. I'm experiencing an issue where PDF thumbnails only appear for online-only files.
For any PDFs that are available offline, no thumbnails are shown. This is clearly not an Adobe or Windows issue—my system displays PDF thumbnails just fine outside of Dropbox. If I move the same files to a non-Dropbox folder, the thumbnails appear with no problem.
Can you help resolve this? Thank you!
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