Image thumbnail not showing up, only generic icon when i goto 'camera uploads' to try to attach imag

I'm also having this same issue.

Would it not be helpful to all DropBox users to simply post the solution here, instead of messaging individual users privately????

What would be helpful is for them to finally resolve it. This has been going on for a while now and I am not sure if I will hold off much longer before choosing an alternative.

Currently the only offering has been to suggest switching the folder from local to online then back again. Which in may case can mean doing this several times a week, and that is before I fire back up after lockdown and start shooting several times a day. 

Not sure why Dropbox support didn't just post this publicly rather than only email me, but here's a solution they sent that worked for me:

Open File Explorer > View tab > Options > View tab > Uncheck Always show icons, never thumbnails (If this is already unchecked, check it and OK..Then go back again and uncheck it and OK

Thanks ramblinsu.

Yeah. Try doing that several times a day and see if you still think of it as a 'solution' I along with others have sent over screenshots and other information on this and so far Zilch after the intial exchanges.

As a photographer when editng I am constantly draging or importing things like textures into my work and dropbox is a way of ensuring access to those from different devices and locations. Once the thumbnail vanishes I have no idea what that texture looks like, As I may import a number of textures into an image to work out what is best for that creation I quickly end up with a folder that is effectively useless to me.

Will have to start looking at Amazon or Adobe cloud options instead as this is now ludicrous. A week and our studio opens back up from lockdown. Once that happens I cannot be messing around like this.

I feel your pain as a working photographer. However, so far this has worked for me. I also have a Box account and Amazon Photos. I may give Box a test run. For me it depends on the integrations with other apps. DropBox provides a lot of integrations that I wouldn't want to work without. 

I've had this same issue all week and tried every suggestion I could find.  What worked for me was using the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows 10 (Right click on your hard drive and select Properties in the menu).  I deleted the thumbnail cache, rebooted my pc and after Dropbox started again the thumbnails started re-appearing.

Same issue here on a clean install of Win 10.  I  did not have this issue before the clean install.  I'm not using smart sync, all files are local.  It only happens with folders within dropbox.  If I move the folder to downloads or some other location outside of dropbox the thumbnails show.

I have deleted thumbs via disk cleanup and command prompt.  I checked and unchecked the "show icon" button.  Nothing worked.

On small folder switching to online then back works but I do not want to do that for my main pictures folder as it's 125+ gb.  This is obviously a bug!

I have the same problem. Double clicking the file to open it does not resolve the issue, the files are synced locally. For me its happening in the folder Dropbx > Screenshots. Its not happening to every file in that folder, only some of them, but a large percentage

I am using the file explorer on my Win10 desktop and am only seeing the icons. I don't want to sync every single file locally with smart sync. I want to be able to see the thumbnail so that I can select the correct file to sync locally. How can I do this? What is the way to fix this? I wish you had posted the answer publicly instead of having to email people individually. Please assist.

There is apparently no permanent solution to this problem and Dropbox seems unwilling to address the issue.

I am pretty well an ignoramus with computers but I may have stumbled and fumbled my way to a solution to this problem.

I found that several of my folders had random images showing only the place marker with a grey X and no thumbnail. I back up all my photos onto an external hard drive so when I found a file which was badly corrupted this way I simply deleted it then replaced it from the external hard drive and right clicked to set all the files to "local".

Another hack for individual images was to right click them, make them "Online Only" then right click again and make them "Local".

That will be because it has nothing to do with failing to check the right boxes. As you would have discovered if you read the thread first. This was a bug with Dropbox that has been accepted as such by them and hopefully now corrected. It has nothing to do with generic settings. It was the loss of thumbnails after dragging and dropping  image files, in my case background textures, into the likes of Photoshop or making use of drag and drop uploaders

Well, I have just finished getting rid of all the grey X's and generic labels from all my photos.

I first right clicked the main "camera images" folder which contains all my pics - literally thousands of 'em, and changed them all to "online only" which took quite a while but I finished up with everything online and a lot more space on my hard drive.

I then right clicked the main file again and changed it to "local". This took a lot longer,  like several hours, but I ended up with a perfect set of photos complete with thumbnails now stored on my hard drive where they belong.

I have no idea exactly when this problem first arose but from the look of this and other threads it has been going on for a while. I just hope my photos will stay fixed and my future uploads will not suffer the same problem.

My thumbnail previews if they do show up disappear once selecting them and inserting them into a program or email.  Then when going back to the folder all the thumbnail previews are gone!  What is this!?  Im paying for the service.

I am having the same issue with the thumbnail disappearing...

Having issue with nit being able to see icons...also pics have the word shortcut on them and not JPEG? Would like to be able to see the icon and also send pics as JPEGS not shortcuts ( no one can open and view). 

There are hundreds of posts all over the Web about this - and yep, I just did a new install on a Win10 machine and now I can't see thumbnails.  Nothing I have tried works - or if it does, it only works briefly.  Tried toggling different modes, deleting thumbs, yada yada. None of it fixes the underlying problem.

This is clearly a bug - I am a programmer, so I know a bug when I see one!  The whole online/offline thing has apparently broken what used to be a great piece of software.  Sadly I don't have time to mess around - I need to see QR codes in generated images for a healthcare app, and this isn't working any more.

Going to check out some alternatives for images - because clearly Dpbx can't fix this problem which has been going on for months.  Very poor if you ask me!

PS Just added a few folders to my Google Drive - and of course this works straight out of the browser - I guess it is a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job - Dropbox is OK for many things, just not for images, I guess.