Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

[Tom_M]

Please please please can you add a feature that allows folders to be excluded from the Dropbox account (on windows and mac). For sure I'm not the first person to request this, but I'm yet to find a good explanation of why it's not there. A quick google search reveals loads of people also looking for the same feature. I really like the workflow I have with dropbox, but it's getting to the point where I might switch providers in order to allow better selective sync.

I've seen hackish solutions using selective sync, but it would be great if this could be done in one of the following ways:
- global pattern matching eg "node_modules"
- a marker file in the directory like .dropboxignore
- a simple right click context menu "Ignore this folder"

Other than that, keep up the good work. Cheers.
Tom

[Emma]

Hi folks, 

Thanks for your feedback on this.
While ignored files delivers for some of the use cases here, I appreciate it does not for all. 
We'll be taking another review of this thread to isolate use cases for a .dropboxignore file feature in particular.

I've updated the status and we'll take this to the product team.
As a side note, it would be helpful for us if you could outline the gap between what ignored files offers, and what a .dropboxignore file feature would add to your workflows.

Thank you.

[Olivier H.3]

+1 BUMP!! OM*G WANT

edit: nay... NEED

[Fahrul R.]

+1

[Chris H.51]

.gitignore for dropbox... +1

[Richard G.62]

+1 from me too. Mainly, as with the others, so that I can use dropbox as a workspace (e.g. with PortableApps' ...erm apps) without having it continually upload temporary files.

[Erik B.8]

My previous Dropbox replacement when trying to get this feature, BitTorrent Sync, pissed me off tremendously.

Now using SyncThing which is free and open source and has forever changed my idea of what file syncing should be like. Yay!

How they do ignores can be found here, it's awesomely (can I even say that?) close to .gitignore: http://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

[Harley C.1]

Has there been any development on this feature? I've got a few situations that would require this (as a developer), particularly things such as cache files - Dropbox has a lot of issues synchronising 'dwsync.xml' (Adobe Dreamweaver cache file), and there's other files such as .git which need not be synchronised. Thanks!

[Louis M.]

The ideal would be a .txt or something that a user can include in a given dropbox folder which would affect all others below it as well, excluding all the filetypes listed within it.

[Rich]

Has there been any development on this feature?

Dropbox does not reveal planned features until they're released in the Beta clients.

[Erin D.2]

I switched over to syncthing just for this feature. It'd be nice to have in dropbox though.

[Jim L.34]

+ 1