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Forum Discussion
Dropbox not syncing files with emojis in the filename
Hello,
I am trying to use dropbox to sync an application that has a bunch of image files in a subfolder. The image files are of emojis, and each filename IS the emoji that it represents. For example, "😀.png" contains a custom image of the 😀 emoji that the program uses.
The issue is that Dropbox won't sync any of the files that have emojis in the filenames. They all get the red X when I try to upload through the filesystem, and I get an error when I try to upload through the web.
I could put everything in a zip file, but I need to be able to run the application out of the dropbox folder on my other computer without extracting.
Any ideas on how to get these files to sync?
Thanks!
Hi aronskaya, thanks for messaging the Community!
Some emojis are supported, however, the issue is related to UTF encoding.
The emojis that aren't working (along with many other, newer emoji) use 4 bytes, which our filesystem doesn't support. The emoji that do work on Dropbox.com are those that use less than 4 bytes.Dropbox supports using emoji that fall in the Basic Multilingual Plance in file and folder names on the website (although there are some OSes that might not sync the files to your desktop computer due to not playing nice with local filesystems).
Emoji that fall into the Supplementary Multilingual Plane won't work with the Dropbox underlying filesystem, newer emoji fall into this category and are not expected to sync with Dropbox.
Hope this helps to clarify matters!
- Rich
Super User II
A red X on your files indicates a sync error, which can happen when a filename contains illegal or incompatible characters. More than likely the emoji characters are simply not compatible and you won't be able to sync them.
While the following help article doesn't list emoji characters, it does provide information on why certain files don't sync.
- Rich is correct, the file character issue will occur on most platforms, ie. if the files were to sync to windows, they would have no idea how to read it. So use something more universal.
A bit of misinformation here. Emoji are unicode characters. Unicode support in filenames *is* universal. You can name a file with emoji characters in the same way you can with Japanese or Cyrillic. I actually tested this on OS X, Windows 10 Home and Ubuntu Linux. I created a text file on OS X with an emoji filename and opened it on each platform. It's Dropbox dropping the ball here, not unicode or the OS.
Other people have also tested this: https://davidzych.com/abusing-emoji-in-windows/
I've done some testing and these are the emojis I've found to sync successfully.
✅♥️ ⬇️ ☂️ ⬛️ ⏹ ☀️ ☘️ ✈️ ✂️
Same here, I cannot sync files with emojis in names. It is really frustrating. If the operating systems support these names, Dropbox has to support them, too.
I use Dropbox to sync my notes, and emojis in note's names are really helpful. Please consider to fix this.
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi aronskaya, thanks for messaging the Community!
Some emojis are supported, however, the issue is related to UTF encoding.
The emojis that aren't working (along with many other, newer emoji) use 4 bytes, which our filesystem doesn't support. The emoji that do work on Dropbox.com are those that use less than 4 bytes.Dropbox supports using emoji that fall in the Basic Multilingual Plance in file and folder names on the website (although there are some OSes that might not sync the files to your desktop computer due to not playing nice with local filesystems).
Emoji that fall into the Supplementary Multilingual Plane won't work with the Dropbox underlying filesystem, newer emoji fall into this category and are not expected to sync with Dropbox.
Hope this helps to clarify matters!
It's one thing to have a hole in your pants and an entirely different thing to patch said hole.
It's been about two years and really nothing has been done to fix the incompatibility with Dropbox and emoji in filenames.
I'm fairly certain it doesn't even raise an error when syncing.
This is certainly a bug. Windows and OS X aren't going to remove emoji filename support anytime soon.
It's 2024:
Still not supporting emojis???
Am I supposed to edit hundreds of filenames by hand??
Unbelievable.
