You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
How to view previews of online-only files on desktop (like how you can in the mobile app)? - macOS
I'm trying to figure out how to see previews, specifically of .jpeg online files, on my mac desktop. I use Dropbox almost exclusively for photo management and it's frustrating not even being able to ...
That’s an interesting one considering in my system settings Dropbox doesn’t come up as HAVING an extension… under security settings > extensions > finder.
However if I go to > added extensions instead, Dropbox Transfer comes up (but that’s it) and is ticked (the only other ones on are Adobe creative cloud which are legit and I cannot live without).
A Dropbox community search tells me finder extensions are being retired by Dropbox (they again blame Apple in their response to the person’s question about it). So it’s entertaining that they are blaming extensions now.
Add me to this thread of frustrated people!! Grateful to everyone who has continually followed up here, I am on Sonoma 14.1 and Dropbox 191.4.4995 - brand new Macbook and I thought I was going insane.
- Sam, it’s been ONE FULL YEAR since this was reported! Soon, yeah right. It’s obvious your position as Community Manger is simply to make excuses and string us along. Enough! Please elevate this complaint. Transfer this case up to a more senior level. We are all fed up and tired of a year’s worth of “we’re working on it.” We need to do our work and we’d all be fired if all we had for our clients—for a year—was endless excuses.
- Sam DBX
Community Manager
Hi everyone,
We're aware it's been some time since this issue was reported: previews not working properly in Finder when in online-only, specifically in Team accounts. However, we want to assure you that our engineering team is actively investigating this.
We'll keep you posted here once we have more meaningful updates or a fix ready. And we'll keep pushing for updates on our end, too.
We appreciate your patience so far,
Sam
hi sam,
any updates about the issue?
thanks!
Same problems here. Sonoma 14.3.1 (23D60), Dropbox: 192.4.4605. New Installation, restart of Dropbox and Finder several times. Online-Preview PSD Files works fine. PDFs and JPGs not. Very annoying for professional use and a lot of money that we spend on a business subscription. I hope there will be a solution soon.
Would be great if this will be fixed soon! It is a key feature issue for me as a photographer! and apparently for a lot of others!
So this notification popped up in my dropbox today, I'm cautiously optimistic but also slightly terrified as the linked help article seems to indicate all our links will break and it seems like a huge change... I can get on board with that if it fixes the image preview issue, which I desperately hope for, but am skeptical after so long.
The linked article was:
https://help.dropbox.com/plans/upcoming-business-team-changes#moreorgI wonder if this is the same update that happened for me on April 28.
If so, it didn't change anything about the thumbnails, but did manage to break all my automations in Zapier because Zapier can no longer connect to my Teams folders. 🙄
Hours of re-doing zaps, and going back and forth with Zapier and Dropbox support about it. But that's a separate issue!
I'm deeply suspicious it will break every Indesign image link I have and mean I have to recreate alias shortcuts for every one of the 20ish jobs I'm currently working on as well as relinking hundreds of images, but I'd take the hit if it meant thumbnail image previews were coming back on mac. However I expect it's the same one you mentioned. Sigh.
I made some tests on a Macbook Intel 2019 with Ventura OS. Nothing different than Sonoma, same problems as I saw before. I don't think that the mac's architecture can make any difference.
Now i have prepared another macbook (M1) with Monterey to do more tests.
I've tried with Dropbox File Provider, i don't understand if this is a beta version of a future stable update but actually, when you approve it for the installation by admin console, it will install on the mac the beta. I'm trying it on my Macbook, Sonoma 14.4.1 M1 Pro and it works like usual Dropbox client but when you press the spacebar for preview, this Dropbox will download the file in the mac if it is stored online.
I don't like this behavior too much but it could be a solution for the topic's problem.
