It sounds like you're referring to the 'unsupported_image' error documented for the /2/files/get_thumbnail endpoint (and corresponding native methods in the official SDKs).
This error will be returned if the Dropbox API can't convert the requested image file to a thumbnail, such as if the file is too large, or doesn't contain valid image data. If the image isn't supported, there isn't a way to work around that to get the endpoint to return a thumbnail for that image.