My images don't load on mobile

[CoveUS]

My images don't load on mobile when I visit my website that uses dropbox direct photo links. The desktop site works fine.

[Alcasti]

PROBLEM SOLVED in importing images on web pages!

1. Copy the image (file) link from Dropbox
2. Paste it changing the part "www.dropbox.com" in "dl.dropboxusercontent.com" as well as the latest letters "dl=0" into "raw=1". Done

So i.e. https://www.dropbox.com/s/3izaxdk70bi4103/spithill.jpg?dl=0 becomes https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/3izaxdk70bi4103/spithill.jpg?raw=1

[Rudi B Rasmussen]

This is not a solution but an ugly workaround.
What do You suggest I do with the thousands of links I already have on many 10-20 different websites!!!

Pleas fix this, or I will have to find another cloud storage provider...

[niallj2000]

I agree with Rudi. This is not a solution. It is just a workaround that will only work for small sites and single posts or individual links in small numbers. I have just under 900 pages that all need to be fixed, all of them have images that are hosted on DropBox. So I am supposed to manually go through every page to apply this "fix"? I'm sorry but that is not good enough!

On another thread about this same issue (which was changed to "solved"... funny that) someone said nothing had changed with DropBox. Well I'm afraid something has changed and it is directly impacting Safari and iOS browsers. The number 1 rule of web development is ensuring your product works in all browsers. A change was made and it has broken Safari and iOS support for image links. So something has gone very wrong here. This was first reported on 1st/2nd March... it is now the 6th and nothing seems to be happening. I can't even log a support ticket as I can't get past the support chat bot. Just not good enough!

If this carries on any longer without a proper fix I will have to find another hosting solution and I will be closing my DropBox account after 5 years of usage.

[rowBear]

I too cannot see png images linked to dropBox locations on Safari or iOS.  Is there a solution?  I am eager to learn of it.

[rowBear]

I would also note that FireFox on iOS will not show the images.

[mrfiledude]

there should be an explanation why the Dropbox protocol ?raw=1 is not working in Safari. I don't see that anything changed in Safari. I reckon Dropbox is within rights to change their file syntax , sharing protocol.. but without a warning? and their documentation re. raw files has not been updated to warn : does not work in Safari. strange stuff..

now, i understand this terrible turn of events can be used to say , 'hey DB is not a web hosting company ; this was always a hack' ...

but still, no warning, means suddenly hundreds, or thousands of web pages suddenly failing.

WTF?????

[Rudi B Rasmussen]

Since DropBox doesn't seem to be interested in helping us, I am desparately trying to fix their **bleep**-up on my own websites, by altering URL's through .htaccess

I have tried the following, but it doesn't do the trick - any .htaccess experts listening in here that might help?

# Example, change url from
#    https://www.dropbox.com/s/7rwuclcfrdwdvjq/M51_LRGB_b2x2_crop.jpg?raw=1
# to
#    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/7rwuclcfrdwdvjq/M51_LRGB_b2x2_crop.jpg?raw=1
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} (w*)dropbox\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

[Kev93]

Did you guys have found a solution?? trying desperately to solved the problem.
And yes this is definitively a dropbox problem.

Appreciate your help.

[hardreturn]

Grabbing the dropbox link for a public file gives this

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9u3ew2yvdwl3sx/Screen%20Shot%202021-03-07%20at%206.39.25%20PM.png?dl=0

Which can then be embedded in a forum or elsewhere by changing dl=0 to raw=1 like this

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9u3ew2yvdwl3sx/Screen%20Shot%202021-03-07%20at%206.39.25%20PM.png?raw=1

viewing that link now changes the url to

https://uc2575b7e4bb042df285e847d3ac.dl.dropboxusercontent.com/cd/0/inline/BKTAUjwnvwUaLsSyA2jIPt8fu...

Wondering what to do in order to link to files properly? 

[jcp543]

@Kev93 unfortunately I don’t believe there is a user end solution for this unless Dropbox decides that’s it’s a big enough priority to fix, and who knows how long that could take. I put my support ticket in last Monday, but nothing yet. If I hear anything I’ll post on here, but I assume it will be a global fix for everybody.

I researched alternative solutions and ended up moving all of my hosted Dropbox files over to a CDN and redirected all of my links there. It was a real pain and a couple days of work but it’s done now and works perfectly. If anyone is curious, I did a lot of research and found BunnyCDN (my referal link) to be very affordable (as low as $1 per month), reliable, and easy to set up. There’s also a 14 day free trail. And since their URLs paths use file names and not random strings like in Dropbox I was able to create a Shorcut to copy the old raw=1 links using some Regex and parse out the file names for the new links which saved tons of time.