How to make an alias with a relative path?

[nileod]

After the Dropbox upgrade to the team accounts, we've lost all of our alias/shortcuts in our shared folders. After reading their suggestions, they basically said that we need to recreate all of the shortcuts again and switch to a relative file path, if available. I've tried to look into this some more but my knowledge basically extends to: right-click and select "Make alias".

Now, the way we use alias is that we're linking to the same exact folder but another file. For example, multiple items might use the same image (think a white t-shirt for S, M, L, and XL). In order to avoid having to save four identical images in the folder, I was making alias to the original. This worked great because when we needed to update the image, I only had to do it once and the aliases would just follow. Since the shortcut is basically in the same folder as the original, I felt like it should be easy to make an alias that says, "hey, just look in this same folder for this name" so that no matter what the folder is called or where it's located, it should be able to find the right file. (For context, aliases were great because we could link the image shortcut in Adobe InDesign and it was smart enough to know to use the original instead of the shortcut.)

Is there a way to do the relative path without getting super complicated about this? I just don't want to make a bunch of new aliases and then it breaks again when Dropbox decides it wants to change things up again.

macOS Big Sur

[Walter]

Hi there @nileod, thanks for posting on our Community and sorry to hear you had issues with this. 

Can you please clarify if you've tried creating new aliases for the files you'd like to have shortcuts for and how did that go?

If you could also confirm the desktop app's exact status and version as shown in your menu bar, I'd appreciate it. 

Thanks!

[nileod]

I am able to make new aliases/shortcuts! But my fear is that it will be broken again, should Dropbox decide to make some other change. I was hoping that there was something I could do to make it a relative path so that it doesn't matter what the folder name is. Like, in html terms.. I'm hoping to make the shortcut from "Server/FolderName/ItemA" to just "../ItemA" Something like that? Is it possible?

I'm not sure what status and version you're looking for. I opened the general and it says Drop v166.4.2920. Does that help?

[Megan]

Hi @nileod, overall I can't tell you that aliases are Dropbox friendly, or supported. 

You can definitely continue on the same route that you are already doing, since it sounds like the way to go. However, from the Dropbox-related perspective, there are no specific steps, that I could give you in order to help with this. 

However, this is why this Community exists. 😎 I'll keep this thread open, and if anyone wants to shed some more light on this, and guide you that'd be more than ideal.

Thank you, I hope this clarifies!

[nileod]

Thanks! I appreciate it!