We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
Forum Discussion
My images don't load on mobile
My images don't load on mobile when I visit my website that uses dropbox direct photo links. The desktop site works fine.
Hi all,
As you may have seen, this issue is now resolved and a fix was rolled out earlier this week 🎉
Let us know if you have any questions.
Emma
How many collective hours have been wasted on this by end users? I spent several hours myself before I found this thread.
I do think it's a Safari issue though due to increasing security and less tolerance for redirects for whatever reason. If that's the case, it's probably not an easy fix for Dropbox since they use redirects to serve the raw file rather than using the shared link itself. With the shared link, they want to get the user to Dropbox.com otherwise it doesn't benefit Dropbox (or arguably the user either since I guess some users would benefit from the options available to save/download/etc. the shared file on Dropbox.com) and I assume the redirects benefit Dropbox too by tracking clicks or embeds on their side.
Anyway, if manually updating the www.dropbox.com links to dl.dropboxusercontent.com works, does anyone know if the new link will remain stable? I had a feeling that the shared link would sometimes redirect to a different "raw" link after a certain amount of time. But I guess if people are finding it's possible to programmatically revise the shared link and get a working raw link, the resulting raw link should be stable. (Or at least as stable as this Dropbox workflow has ever been, which in my brief experience over the last couple of years has been a moving target and not stable at all.)
mrfiledude - My website is hosting a phpBB board. And 99% of the broken links are in so called BBCode tags. I have looked in the core phpBB implementation, and unfortunately, I cant easily inject str_replace code such as You suggested. That was also my first thought. Now I am considering making a search and replace in the phpBB sql database.
All posts texts on the forum are stored as strings in the database, for example:
"Here's my latest image of the Rosetta Nebula:
[img]https://www.dropbox.com/s/76fdtyig90hv1id/Rosetta_HSO_RGB.jpg?raw=1[/img]"
I guess that I could make a SQL that replaces the www.dropbox with dl.dropboxusercontent enclosed by "[img]https://" and "%?raw=1[/img]".
I hate to say it, but I believe the switch to dl,dropboxusercontent is temporary at best.
Sooner or later, Safari will close that hack. I imagine other browsers will follow.
As others have mentioned, it's the raw=1, the redirect, they dislike.
I intend to keep my images at DB for storage.
Meanwhile, I'm going to ImageKit.
Their free plan allows 20 GB per month, well under my needs.
Good luck, guys.- Having already been through this the first time they deprecated links I’m of a similar opinion. The lack of transparency on this issue is also very troubling and furthers my concern that the workaround will also break.
I am using Dropbox images in posts I make to SMF bulletin boards. I have noticed recently that the images appear fine when viewed from Windows 10 but are missing under iOS. There is a suggestion that the problem may be related to too many redirects and could be a Dropbox problem. You will find a fuller description of this issue and an example at https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=577082.0 I am using the standard version of Dropbox.
I've encountered an instance of a link that I had edited with dl.dropboxusercontent now displaying the same behavior.
so that seems to a be a temporary fix.
What befuddles me is that a member of our photo forum who could no longer see his images in Safari also asked friends with older Macs that have not been updated in years to check his links. They also couldn’t see the shared images. If this problem is caused by an Apple security update for Safari, why does it also impact old machines no longer getting any updates?
Moved over to imagekit.
Dropbox doesn't seem interested in even addressing this, much less helping.
