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Forum Discussion
Smart Sync and Quick Preview on Mac
Smart Sync causes my quick preview function (spacebar) to not function properly on my Mac. I can't preview thumbnails, or quick preview any videos or photos. Any ideas why this happens?
Likely because you're trying to preview a file that doesn't exist on your computer.
When you set a file to Online Only, the only thing that's left of that file on your computer is the necessary information to make it appear in the folder. Since there's no content in the file, your OS (nor any other program) is able to preview it.
Remember, when you set a file to Online Only, the file is removed from the computer leaving behind only a marker file. In order to access that file, whether it be to open and edit it or simply preview it, the file needs to be on the computer (Smart Sync doesn't allow you to open files directly from the Dropbox servers). When you open a file, it's synced back to your local drive and then opened as normal. When you're done with the file, if you want it to be online-only again, you need to mark it as such.
I opened a support ticket. They said to turn off Dropbox and see if it was still happening, because that would prove it wasn't Dropbox. I turned it off during a time when it was acting up and the problem continued. I'm not convinced that rules out Dropbox, but Support apparently is, and maybe they're right. I can't find any trace of a single non-Dropbox using Mac user who has to use the "qlmanage -r" command in terminal after about every 10 viewings of an image, but that's my life now. And no one is interested in helping.
It is Dropbox, after I had issues with this, I had to unsync everything I had on my computer from dropbox, disable the smart sync and use dropbox the old way, and I didn't have the issue anymore, the problem is with the Smart Sync feature, it does something in OSX that after a while messes up the quick preview feature for everything on the computer, disregarding if it's a dropbox file, synced or not or a local file.
This is a issue with dropbox and I'm really dissapointed by the way this has been handled, specially since this is a feature for enterprise accounts. I thought they would pay more attention to this issues and not dismiss them just like they have been doing in this thread.
