Force render issues (raw=1) and shared links won't work for hosting.

Not only do new hotlinks not render, old ones do not show up either

Firefox

Chrome

Brave

Opera

[links removed]

Yet hotlinks from other sites are no problem

FWIW, I'm seeing the broken links with images shared in April. Some older images are still working, but I'm not sure when the cut-off date is yet, if there even is one.

I read elsewhere that the cutoff could be March, but there is no official confirmation from Dropbox about this issue. For now, I'm assuming no images are guaranteed to remain active.

Hopefully, Dropbox can clarify what's going on.

A friend of mine demonstrated that an older image he linked to from Dropbox still worked in the animation forum's public page. So I did a test using one of my old Dropbox image links, and sure enough, it still worked. This made me wonder if there was a cut-off date and if only new images were needed for public posting.

So then I went about replacing my Dropbox images in the forum from last week using Imgur as the host. Since the problem started as I posted images last Wednesday, I thought that's where it would end, but then I found broken images in the forum from April.

I read elsewhere that the cut-off could be with images uploaded since March, but I haven't seen this confirmed by Dropbox. 

Can someone from Dropbox PLEASE respond?

Regarding using Imgur, I stopped using this service nine years ago, so I had to reactivate my account, verify my email, and change my password. Once I got past that, I was surprised to find images I posted to the forum over nine years ago were still there! Imgur is still a free service so, at the moment anyway, I can recommend this.

Personally, I'd rather keep using Dropbox as a subscriber, but I'm reconsidering now. Just getting any response from Dropbox staff could help me decide.

Thanks i advance for any reply.

Again, thank you very much for your helpful response. It's much appreciated.

Not exactly. About ETA, not at all. The only official comment coming from Dropbox staff, as far as I know, is here. Not too much, but better than nothing. If there is some chance, I believe Greg will do whatever possible.

Much appreciated, thank you. Have Dropbox acknowledged this and indicated when it is likely to be fixed?

Hi GeorgeNotaTechExpert,

Yes there is an issue. Not to repeat, take a look here. You can still use links with changed domains. Let's hope this will be fixed ASAP.

Good luck.

Hi all

I run a site called Maths Advance and have a number of images stored on Dropbox which are then loaded into individual questions modules when users click on a question. I know now that I shouldn't have used Dropbox for these purposes and that other servers are better for website performance, but in any case it has been reliable up until now.

My question is why might some images now not be appearing for users? This has only been an issue in the last 48 hours, but needs to be fixed ASAP. All of the images are stored on Dropbox and some are loading, but others are not. The filetype and size of the file does not appear to be a critical factor.

Any ideas would be most welcome.

why the images I upload to Dropbox and display on my website suddenly crash, but when I check on Dropbox, the image files are still there. However, when I try to display them using 'raw=1' in the image URL, it crashes on my website.

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torvat-ITA wrote:

I do agree with the statement that dropbox isn't a hosting platform. 🙂

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I don't agree with that statement. There is no difference between sharing something stored in Dropbox and serving something stored in Dropbox. Arguably, serving as raw=1 takes less processing.

The help page does say that "adding raw=1 to a URL will cause an HTTP redirect", and that could cause problems; but what it appears to be doing at the moment is not simply a 302 redirect (it does do that as well) but actually serving text/html content first. Where a recipient is expecting content-type: image/jpeg or content-type: application/pdf, serving content-type: text/html will cause problems. It's that behaviour which has changed.