Why do my tags disappear when I set my files to online only?

Hi walter, at the moment there is incosistent behaviour between local and online tagging,

if i tag a file in local mode and switch to online only, i lost my tags, if i come back ti local mode i see my tags infos on this files. 

This strange behaviour not permit to tags file and search single file in only online mode (i have mojave) but for example, it work correctly only with folders.

Can you pass to tech and fix?

Thx

D

Thanks for the additional information D - I appreciate it.

I've just sent you a brief message to your Dropbox email address so we can have a further look into this. Once you get back to me there, I'll send this up to an expert for further investigation. 

Take a look at your inbox (ticket ID: 9038951) and we'll take it from there. Thanks!

Hi walter,

i have send you and a mail with a link to my screen cast, please let me know!

Best!

I have this problem as well. Was there any solution to this issue? It's really annoying because I take a lot of photos and color tag them based on quality. However camera RAWs take up a lot of space and I'd like to keep them SmartSync online only.

Thanks

Sorry to hear about this Tabor W. - I'll let the team know about your interest in this functionality; thank you for your feedback.

Thanks Walter. That doesn't really help since photo RAWs take up a lot of space but I would still want to be able to load them into image processing software on my computer. Having that metadata lost when moving from local to online only is disappointing because it's not easy to tell photos are which without opening them up and viewing them. While I realize that the metadata is restored upon re-sync to local, it's still not ideal when you're dealing with thousands of large files that I might need to open in a program like Photoshop.

I do hope that ensuring the MacOS tag metadata is available in online-only mode on the local filesystem makes it into your engineering calendar.

Thanks

wow yea same here .. i have thousands of files that were painstakingly catelogued with colored tags for business purpose and when we transferred from the source mac to a new mac (aka our same account) .. then after all was transferrred the original mac was repurposed... Now we see all our tags gone ! the tags *are* part of the file structure!

The super annoying part is that this _used_ to work correctly.  We did fairly extensive testing about 5 months ago and the tags _used_ to sync fine with using Online Only sync, but at some point since then the behaviour changed.

Not only did the behaviour change here, but some things actually got worse.  You used to be able to add metadata (tags, comments, etc) to the files when in online-only sync mode, and then when you synced them it would push the changes made.  Now it blindy pulls the changes from the online copy overwriting any local changes that may have been made.

To me this is a bug without a doubt.  Even if DB has decided to change the behaviour in terms of no longer pulling file metadata offline, the fact that it's throwing away local file changes when syncing (that are unrecoverable) is a pretty serious bug IMHO.

With these types of undocumented and unannounced low level changes it makes Dropbox less appealing to business customers.  We had started basing an entire knowledge capturing system on this behaviour and I'm very very glad that we didn't continue with it because if we did we would have lost everything with this change DB made.

Thanks for providing your extensive feedback on this people - I'll make sure to pass your comments on to our dev team for their consideration.

In the meantime, I checked on this internally and here's what I found about this:

When we remove a file and create a placeholder that’s not a real file, so the metadata isn’t part of it anymore. 

Syncing Mac Os's custom tags is not an expected behaviour at this time so if any of you guys has seen this previously it's an exception rather than the rule. The tag is stored in the metadata of the file, which isn’t present once evicted.   

I know this isn't the answer you were looking for, yet, I hope it helps clarify things a tad further.