Is there a way to get multiple image thumbnails in batches using Dropbox API?

[Pritam B.]

Hi,

Is there a way to get image thumbnails in batches using the dropbox API? For example, this blog post describes a way how it was achieved by the official dropbox app. But it seems that this API is not available to third party developers.

I looked through the Android SDK documentation also. There seems to be no method which accepts an array of urls to provide multiple thumbnails in one call. Am I missing something?

Any help in this matter will be greatly appreciated, as downloading image thumbnails in batches will greatly improve the user experience for the third party apps.

Regards,

Pritam.

[Greg-DB]

The Dropbox API doesn't currently offer a way to get thumbnails in batches like this, but I'll be sure to pass this along as a feature request.

[Aaron F.16]

If you are passing on requests, it would be nice to get back thumbnail urls in response to a metadata request, and to have them accessible without authentication, much like a media request. That would save at least one transaction per image, and speed up the other by allowing developers to put the thumbnail url directly in an <img> tag rather than using a base64 or blob url. Also, then the browser would cache, rather than the application.

Maybe something like this:

{
    "size": "225.4KB",
    "rev": "35e97029684fe",
    "thumb_exists": true,
    "thumb_url": "https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/1/view/thumb/xxxxxx/mypic.jpg"
    "thumb_expires":  "Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:55:38 +0000",
    "bytes": 230783,
    "modified": "Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:55:38 +0000",
    "client_mtime": "Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:04:35 +0000",
    "path": "/mypic.jpg",
    "is_dir": false,
    "icon": "page_white_acrobat",
    "root": "dropbox",
    "mime_type": "image/jpeg",
    "revision": 220823
}

Thanks,

-A-

[Greg-DB]

Thanks for the request, I'll pass that along too!

[Greg-DB]

The Dropbox API now offers the ability to get thumbnails in batches:

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-get_thumbnail_batch

If you're using an official SDK, there will also be a corresponding method for this endpoint.