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su_su_su's avatar
su_su_su
New member | Level 2
7 years ago

Creating shortcuts within a Dropbox folder

Dear Community,   I am working with several other people in a share Dropbox folder, which contains several subfolders. Now I wanted to create a shortcut from one subfolder to another subfolder with...
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  • Sanchez's avatar
    Sanchez
    7 years ago
    Hey su_su_su, welcome to our community! 

    If you’re attempting to create shortcuts (.lnk files) from within Windows in your local Dropbox folder, this will not work. When you do this, the shortcut will work for you, on your computer, but not for other users whom you are sharing the file with. Dropbox will sync the shortcut as a shortcut file, rather than the file that the shortcut points to, and it is pointing to a location on your computer. 

    We suggest that you remove these .lnk files in order to avoid any confusion. You can identify a shortcut by looking for a small arrow overlaid on the file icon. If Dropbox is running, the Dropbox syncing icon may cover the shortcut icon, so you will need to quit Dropbox temporarily if you want to check on the files you currently have stored in your local Dropbox folder. Alternatively, you can use the Windows search function to search for all .lnk files within your Dropbox folder, and then delete them. 
     
    What you could do is to create a document into which you can paste the addresses of these folders from your browser. As you open each folder location in your account online, copy the address from your browser’s address bar, and paste it into the document. Then, you can save the document as a PDF, and place it in the top level folder, or any other location in your Dropbox. All links will be live, clickable, and will directly take the user to the linked location. This will only work at Dropbox.com, and if you move folders around, the links will break, and you’ll have to modify the original document, and save again as a PDF. 

    Another way to do this would be with Paper. If all your collaborators are using Dropbox Paper, you can create this document here, and just share it to everyone, without needing to save or export it to PDF. Any edits you make to this document will be instantly seen, in real time, by all users, ensuring that all users have the same information. 
    We hope this helps! 

    Walter & Sanchez
qubitstx's avatar
qubitstx
New member | Level 2

Actually, yes, you can do this as a standard Windows shortcut link (.lnk), but only works with the Dropbox App. 

 

First create the shortcut as you would normally do.  Then in file properties, change the target to replace the "C:\...\Dropbox\ ..." to %USERPROFILE%\\Dropbox\... where the ellipsis is the rest of the file location.  You can also change the "Start in" to C:"^%UserProfile^%\\Dropbox\".

 

When the system synchronizes, the other users will get the updated location, which automatically replaces the %USERPROFILE% variable with the appropriate location for them.  Note, this only works within the app, as the sync'd files are locally stored.  Effectively, the link customizes itself for the given user.  This also works for file links.

Rich's avatar
Rich
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
7 years ago
qubitstx wrote:

First create the shortcut as you would normally do.  Then in file properties, change the target to replace the "C:\...\Dropbox\ ..." to %USERPROFILE%\\Dropbox\... where the ellipsis is the rest of the file location.

This will only work if Dropbox is located in their user profile, and will only work on Windows comptuers. Many people use a different location for their Dropbox folder, and many more use a different OS. Also, if this is in a shared folder, the shared folder location isn't the same for all members. Any member of a share can move and rename a shared folder to anything they want without affecting the other members. This would mean their copy of a file is in a different location compared to yours.

 

In all of those cases, the updated shortcuts will not work.

  • OtherBruce's avatar
    OtherBruce
    New member | Level 2
    7 years ago

    Does this come off as kludgy from the provider end?  It does from this end.

    I'm in a workgroup of five people that all have all the same Dropbox access.  When a job converts from a quote to an approved job, it gets a job number & a new directory (not my choice).  To make life easier I started putting a link in the new folder to get to the quote folder - then discovered they were of no use to anyone else. 

    As many questions as I found on this here - it seems like it should be a priority to create a path for this. 

    qubitstx had a logical solution I'm going to try.  If it was auto-created as "%UserName%" life would be a lot simpler, and be as useful to the creator as the current version that has the creator's name in the path wouldn't it?  

    We can be responsible for broken links if some sombish moves files.

    Just my 2¢

     

     

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