Dropbox installs & integrations
Connect your tools and content together with help from the Dropbox Community. Join a discussion or post a question of your own to get started.
Recently Dropbox has begun to create .dropbox.device files on SD cards. This triggers an error in Adobe Lightroom on import:
The files are not photos or videos. (1)
/Volumes/Untitled/DCIM/MISC/.dropbox.device
I already have always had "Enable camera uploads" UNchecked. These cards are freshly formatted in-camera before each use, so Dropbox is creating this invisible file fresh each time. The file is 56 bytes and seems like a binary becuse it looks like garbage reading it with Vim.
macOS 10.14.6
Lightroom Classic 9.2.1
Dropbox Version 97.4.467 (97.4.467)
Sony Alpha a6600 camera, Sony SF-G64T SD card, Transcend USB 3.0 card reader
Hello @billickc thanks for reaching out to us here!
Just so I can have a bit of a better understanding of what's occurring here, can you let me know a brief step-by-step of what you're doing that ends with this error?
For example, are you connecting the SD card to your computer and during the Import to Adobe Lightroom you're getting this error? Do you get any Dropbox pop ups during the process at all?
Out of curiosity, does the same occur if you have the desktop app closed? You can close the app by:
Let me know and we can go from there!
Daphne
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
Did this post help you? If so, please give it a Like below.
Still stuck? Ask me a question!
Tips & Tricks Find new ways to stay in flow or share your tips on how you work smarter with Dropbox.
Sure. As I said, I have always had Dropbox camera import off. I never have the desktop Dropbox app running. Dropbox does have an active menu bar icon and syncs a subset of folders in the background (none of those folders are associated with Lightroom).
Thanks for getting back to me here @billickc!
If you see the Dropbox icon in your menu bar, then it means the app is still running on your computer and syncing your Dropbox folder as you mentioned.
Could you please try closing the app with the steps mentioned above and let me know if you get the same error again when connecting importing to Lightroom again?
Daphne
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
Did this post help you? If so, please give it a Like below.
Still stuck? Ask me a question!
Tips & Tricks Find new ways to stay in flow or share your tips on how you work smarter with Dropbox.
No error or invisible file when importing with the Desktop app/menu item quit.
Restarted my Mac (so Desktop Dropbox relaunched) and we're back to the same nonsense where Dropbox saves invisible files onto my SD cards despite "Enable camera uploads" being UNchecked.
error text:
The files are not photos or videos. (1)
/Volumes/Untitled/DCIM/MISC/.dropbox.device
unwanted invisible file:
$ pwd
/Volumes/Untitled/DCIM/MISC
$ ls -lah
total 384
drwxrwxrwx 1 myusername staff 128K May 26 11:25 .
drwxrwxrwx 1 myusername staff 128K May 26 10:25 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 myusername staff 56B May 26 11:25 .dropbox.device
Hey there @billickc, apologies for the very delayed reply here!
I was looking into this for you from my side, and would need to investigate a little more alongside some device specific info.
If you're still having this issue and would like to look into it further together, please let me know and I can reach out to you directly to continue where we left off.
Thanks!
Daphne
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
Did this post help you? If so, please give it a Like below.
Still stuck? Ask me a question!
Tips & Tricks Find new ways to stay in flow or share your tips on how you work smarter with Dropbox.
To be perfectly honest, that's a task for your QA department. Apps that write to my SD cards without permission have no business on my system. I uninstalled Dropbox completely and upgraded my iCloud storage tier instead.
The way we work is changing. Share and discover new ways to work smarter with Dropbox in our community.
Sound good? Let's get started.Hi there!
If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for a ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on Twitter or Facebook.
For more info on available support options, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question, please 'like' the post to say thanks to the user!