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 ...
Sam DBX
Community Manager
Community ManagerHi pedroms 👋🏽, hope you're doing well.
At the moment, I'm unable to provide you with an exact timeframe, but we're aware of these reports, and it's definitely on our team's radar.
We'll keep everyone updated here.
Thanks.
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.
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.
Follow up - update didn't fix the issue. Also didn't break any links. In fact nothing seemed to change at all.
