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Forum Discussion
How to open dropbox link from slack to finder?
Our teams use Dropbox and Slack and we daily share internal dropbox project links from our dropbox to Slack.
The question everyone has, how can you easily open a dropbox link from slack to reveal i...
Short answer... no.
And remember that the path to a file on your computer will not be the same as the path to a file on someone else's computer, even if that file is in the same shared folder. By default, each user's Dropbox folder is located within their computer user profile, which often include that person's name or username in the path. That means a link to a file on your computer will not work on anyone else's comptuer. Add to that the fact that people can freely rename shared folders to anything they want without impacting the functionality of the share, and that just complicates it even more.
The only way for a full path to a file on your comptuer to work on other comptuers, is if everyone has Dropbox in the exact same location and haven't renamed the shared folder that the file is located in. If that's the case, you can just copy the path to the file from Explorer/Finder and share is at you like.
Thanks for your reply!
Sorry this is clearly a bit difficult to explain:
Our team uses dropbox business and have the same team main folder synced to their computer with all the subfolders as online-only.
If I'm working on a project folder inside that team folder, and want to share that folder location via slack to my colleagues so that they can easily open that folder in their computer's finder (as they have that same team dropbox and should have that folder already on their hard-drive synced as online-only or maybe even local), there seems to be no easy way to do this.
What I understand my only options are:
1) Just manually write that location (which could be very deep in the folder structure) in slack, and they will go to their finder and start clicking trough our team dropbox folder to find it so that they can start working on the files
2) Use "Copy Dropbox link" and paste it to slack so that people can open that folder in web, view previews and download files. However this is the problem as our team members need to work on the files and again manually locate that folder on our dropbox to do so.
So what I'm asking is, is there a way to copy and share the location of a folder inside the same team dropbox, as the dropbo web does not seem to have the option to locate that folder on your computer if you would have that synced?
Rich
Super User II
Super User IIShort answer... no.
And remember that the path to a file on your computer will not be the same as the path to a file on someone else's computer, even if that file is in the same shared folder. By default, each user's Dropbox folder is located within their computer user profile, which often include that person's name or username in the path. That means a link to a file on your computer will not work on anyone else's comptuer. Add to that the fact that people can freely rename shared folders to anything they want without impacting the functionality of the share, and that just complicates it even more.
The only way for a full path to a file on your comptuer to work on other comptuers, is if everyone has Dropbox in the exact same location and haven't renamed the shared folder that the file is located in. If that's the case, you can just copy the path to the file from Explorer/Finder and share is at you like.
I don't think Lauri was talking about links shared outside her team but rather links shared within the team. And I don't think this answer actually is a solution to the problem at all.
Of course the local dropbox path is different for each user but that is exaclty why this would be such a great feature for Dropbox to implement. Otherwise we could just manage this ourselves by sending absolute paths.
Since Dropbox sync works, Dropbox obviously knows exactly which files in my teams Dropbox cloud folder maps to which files on my local machine. So if I get a Dropbox link from a colleague (in the same Dropbox team), Dropbox should be able to tell me exactly which file that is on my local machine and offer the option to open it.
Here's a use case that I believe would be possible.
- My collegue (in the same dropbox team) sends me a dropbox link
- I click the link and the folder or file opens on dropbox.com
- Om dropbox.com there is a button offering me the option to open the folder/file locally
- Pressing that button opens the local Dropbox.app (either via URL mapping locally if possible or by messaging the opened local Dropbox application) which immediately invokes the "view in finder" logic
Is this impossible to implement? Please let me know why that is in that case.
I am having the same issue as Lauri, which is described accurately by henrou
There is no button to either open a file or open a folder (when on dropbox.com), that then opens the same file or folder within the dropbox app. So when team members using the same dropbox send each other links for easy location to a file (whether through Slack or other), the only option is to work on it in dropbox.com. The OPEN button gives other app options, but unfortunately not the dropbox app option or even the Open in Finder option.
Download is not an option because it creates a duplicate file rather than keeping the orginal file which everyone is working on together
Can this issue be continued here, or does a new one need to be started to find a solution to this? Thx.
Yeah super annoying that such an obvious feature is missing. I feel like dropbox has stopped developing their core app but are putting effort into paper and other services that are not that relevant to me personally. The desktop app still feels super heavy and features such as selective sync is annoyingly hard to access (as with smart sync I still dont want some folders to be synced at all).
Eh, well to get the job done, there is a feature in Dropbox already which enables you to click on a link, navigate to the file/folder on Dropbox.com, and Open the file locally via Finder.
That's the solution to the root problem here.
