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

[raziel79]

Dear, 

i have installed dropbox app on 2 macs, i have sync my box and i have used colored native tags system on first mac to tag some files with custom tags. It was correctly replicated on second mac. So i switch all my files in "only online" mode and i lost all my tags. If i restore "local mode" it appear. Why? can i use my tags also with "online mode" and share with all dropbox installations?

Best

[Walter · Accepted solution]

Hey there @raziel79, how are you today?

As we don't currently have strong support for Mac OS's tagging feature (as you noticed the behavior is incosistent between 'Online Only' and 'Local' files), I wanted to thank you for the feedback and feature request for an option to be able to sync Mac's tags applied on files and/or folders across devices no matter what the state of those files is, be it 'Online Only' or 'Local'.

Our dev team are always on the look for user input when creating our next versions of the Dropbox app and we're always looking for ways to improve our services. 

Therefore, I will make sure your comments are passed along to them to express your interest in this. 

If there's anything else I can assist with in the meantime, please let me know. 

[raziel79]

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

[Walter]

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!

[raziel79]

Hi walter,

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

Best!

[Tabor W.]

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

[Walter]

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

In the meantime, please note that these tags would be stripped upon the conversion of a file from "local" to "online only".   

I'm not sure if this helps but have you considered using selective sync instead of Smart Sync as this another way to free up space on your computer?  

Just note that selectively un-synced folders will not show up at all on your computer but you'll be able to access them anytime through our website. 

I know it's not much, yet, I hope this helped to some extent. 

[Tabor W.]

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

[jsfunfun]

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!

[BridgeableAdmin]

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.