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Christian W.10's avatar
Christian W.10
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago
Solved

Dropbox not syncing files with emojis in the filename

Hello,   I am trying to use dropbox to sync an application that has a bunch of image files in a subfolder. The image files are of emojis, and each filename IS the emoji that it represents. For exam...
sync
  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    6 years ago

    Hi aronskaya, thanks for messaging the Community!

     

    Some emojis are supported, however, the issue is related to UTF encoding.


    The emojis that aren't working (along with many other, newer emoji) use 4 bytes, which our filesystem doesn't support. The emoji that do work on Dropbox.com are those that use less than 4 bytes.

     

    Dropbox supports using emoji that fall in the Basic Multilingual Plance in file and folder names on the website (although there are some OSes that might not sync the files to your desktop computer due to not playing nice with local filesystems).

     

    Emoji that fall into the Supplementary Multilingual Plane won't work with the Dropbox underlying filesystem, newer emoji fall into this category and are not expected to sync with Dropbox.

     

    Hope this helps to clarify matters!

Rich's avatar
Rich
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
8 years ago

A red X on your files indicates a sync error, which can happen when a filename contains illegal or incompatible characters. More than likely the emoji characters are simply not compatible and you won't be able to sync them.

 

While the following help article doesn't list emoji characters, it does provide information on why certain files don't sync.

 

  • RubixVi's avatar
    RubixVi
    New member | Level 2
    8 years ago
    Rich is correct, the file character issue will occur on most platforms, ie. if the files were to sync to windows, they would have no idea how to read it. So use something more universal.
    • Christian W.10's avatar
      Christian W.10
      Helpful | Level 5
      8 years ago

      Thanks for your replies. The files are on Windows now, it reads them fine. Mac does as well. I can't rename them, they were named by the developer of the application, renaming them will break it. 

       

      I guess file this under something that "should" work but "doesn't?"

    • Earl M.'s avatar
      Earl M.
      Helpful | Level 6
      8 years ago

      A bit of misinformation here. Emoji are unicode characters. Unicode support in filenames *is* universal. You can name a file with emoji characters in the same way you can with Japanese or Cyrillic. I actually tested this on OS X, Windows 10 Home and Ubuntu Linux. I created a text file on OS X with an emoji filename and opened it on each platform. It's Dropbox dropping the ball here, not unicode or the OS. 

      Other people have also tested this: https://davidzych.com/abusing-emoji-in-windows/

      • Ross_S's avatar
        Ross_S
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
        8 years ago
        It becomes very complicated but basically everyone is correct.

        Emojis will cause a file not to sync. Some emojis are unicode and will sync without issues, others will not. Its all down to which ones fall within ASCII I believe

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