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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 exam...
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!
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi 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.
I'm not here to defend Dropbox, but I think the characterization that Dropbox does not support emoji is not correct. They DO support emoji's, but only a subset of emoji's that are have more universal support accross systems. That subset is described in previous posts within this thread.
This limition does mean that we have to be careful which emoji we can use, and it is it has been a bit annoying on my part because I constantly have to check for unsupported unicode characters (emoji are unicode) and delete them from filenames in order to sync.
My feedback to Dropbox:
1. If you can easily extend support to the wider set of unicode characters, please do so.
2. If not, at least please give us an easy way to systemically check for files that fail to sync due to unsupported names. As of right now, it fails silently, and I have to manually check for which files have the "red" mark next to it with a visual scan, which is not a good use of my time.
The problem is that the average end user isn't going to care that only a subset of emoji isn't supported nor will they care about the explaination. They'll just say that files failing to sync because of characters in the filename is broken... and they are entirely correct.
I think this would have been fixed faster if files with accents or file using non-latin alphabets didn't sync. Then it would have been taken seriously.
The problem is failing silently. I've lost files and clobbered updates because I wasn't aware that some files and folders were not being synced. If I can't rely on it then I can't and won't use it.
Supporting a non-obvious subset of unicode is not a reasonable product decision.
Financially supporting a company that only supports a subset of unicode in filenames when every other cloud storage company supports full unicode filenames is more unresonable in my opinion.
However you are free to spend your money as you wish
