2025 sparked some incredible conversations across our community 👩💻. Discover the highlights and see what’s ahead in 2026.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Smart Sync and Quick Preview on Mac
Smart Sync causes my quick preview function (spacebar) to not function properly on my Mac. I can't preview thumbnails, or quick preview any videos or photos. Any ideas why this happens?
Likely because you're trying to preview a file that doesn't exist on your computer.
When you set a file to Online Only, the only thing that's left of that file on your computer is the necessary information to make it appear in the folder. Since there's no content in the file, your OS (nor any other program) is able to preview it.
Remember, when you set a file to Online Only, the file is removed from the computer leaving behind only a marker file. In order to access that file, whether it be to open and edit it or simply preview it, the file needs to be on the computer (Smart Sync doesn't allow you to open files directly from the Dropbox servers). When you open a file, it's synced back to your local drive and then opened as normal. When you're done with the file, if you want it to be online-only again, you need to mark it as such.
Jane has to be a bot. It's just the same gaslighting in every single post, and it boils down to what tech support has been telling customers they don't care about for decades: hmm, dunno, must be your other software/your hardware/your stupidity. Not our fault! Thanks for the money, sucker!
I "solved" this problem by quitting Dropbox and going back to relying on my Mac hard drive with physical and cloud backups, and archiving old files onto a NAS server which also gets a cloud backup.
Dropbox hasn't gotten a penny from me in more than a year (this issue is actually several years old). It's very clear to me that Dropbox's leadership has actually decided they just don't care about losing Mac customers because there aren't enough of us and sorting out why their product doesn't work for us isn't cost-effective. So they just send this bot in to perform "tech support theater" in which somehow we can never quite give "her" enough information to convince "her" it's anything Dropbox should bother looking into.
I don't pay to be treated that way. And Dropbox obviously didn't care that I left.
Just to reiterate what I said in a previous post. Dropbox is well aware of exactly what the problem is. There is no need to waste your time emailing back and forth or screensharing to describe the problem.
That said, they actually do have a solution. Not a very great one (which is probably why they don't roll it out to all users.) But after emailing back and forth with them and explaining my problem and calling out their insincerity, I noticed that the problem was suddenly solved on my account and that of my coworker's. Our dropbox will now show previews for images even when they are in the cloud only.
The problem is, it doesn't perform very well. It takes a really long time to download a lower resolution image and desplay the preview. But it does work. More importantly, it no longer disables quick look for the rest of my files that ARE downloaded.
My guess is that this isn't a solution they can send out to everyone, for some reason or another. But it does seem that if you give them enough greif, they might enable this feature on your account.
Take a look at this screenshot to see exactly how this works.
