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
Adobe not downloading online only files from projects
Hi All,
after updating to MacOS 12.3 I have not been able to open project files (Premiere/After Effects) without errors of not finding files that are in dropbox as 'online only'. Prior to the Mac ...
Hi there,
In order for this fix to be applied, you need to opt into Dropbox for macOS on File Provider. The latest version of Dropbox for macOS utilizes Apple’s updated File Provider API and fixes issues related to opening online-only files in third-party applications for users on macOS 12.5 or higher. You can read more about opting into Dropbox for macOS File Provider here. Please note that not all users are eligible at this time.
This is being rolled out to Dropbox Teams at the moment, but the team admin must choose to opt-in for the entire team when they are told it has been made available. If you are experiencing this issue, and are a member of a Dropbox team, then we recommend to align with your team admin and ensure that they opt-in as soon as they can, so that this issue is fixed for you. You can find out more here.Regards,
Emmet
Hello,
We recently upgraded our Macs to macOS 12.3.1 through clean installs and reinstalled Dropbox, but ever since then, Adobe After Effects has become unusable. From what I can gather, Smart Sync is no longer available and we only have online/offline modes, but they no longer automatically open the files our AFX workfiles are linking to. Whenever I open an AFX workfile, I get the '86 :: 1' and '3 :: 6' errors that he can't open the source file. All files on the server are 0 bytes (so thinks they're damaged) untill I manually set them to offline mode, which is impossible given the complexity of our workfiles to manually sync each file.
I did come across this: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/macos-12-monterey-support
Could this have something to do with it?
A temporary workaround seems to be to create packages of those workfiles on a Windows PC, then move them locally on our Macs. But that's really no long term viable solution. Is there an update expected that will address this? Or fix anyone is aware of? We'd really appreciate it. Prior to this everything worked fine ...
- Walter
Dropbox Staff
Hi Konrad_Dobson, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.
As you probably know, we're actively working on full support for macOS 12.3 (Monterey) and higher.
If you choose to update to macOS 12.3, you may notice some issues with opening online-only files in third-party applications -like Adobe After Effects- on your Mac. As a temporary workaround, you can open online-only files directly in Finder.
To make an online-only file available to open in third-party applications:
1. Open your Dropbox folder in Finder.
2. Right-click the file you want to have available.
3. Click Make available offline.
The file will be downloaded within your Dropbox folder and can be opened through any third-party application.
Note: Online-only files have a cloud icon next to them. Once an online-only file has been downloaded in Dropbox, you’ll see the cloud icon change to a green checkmark.I hope this helps to some extent!
This issue is ongoing and greatly affects those using After Effects. I cannot work with the project regardless of the download status of the linked files, they continually give errors in After Effects even after downloading all the missing files. Why is your process breaking everything, Dropbox???? This was not happening before, now it's screwing up my entire pipeline!
Thank you, Walter. That solution can help us for a few days. But is there an estimated ETA on a more permanent fix for this?
If it's too long a better solution for us might be re-formatting with an older version of MacOS, correct?
Hi Walter,
Is it possible to download a previous version of Dropbox? And would that solve our problem until a new version is released?
Or is there an idea when this might be solved?
Thank you.
It is absurd this hasn't been resolved yet.
Adobe Indesign files point to assets outside of the file, and these can be scattered in a thousand different places on a storage system (referencing files in other projects). To say that you need to Smart Sync EACH of those folders locally / manually rather than Dropbox automatically triggering the download when the INDD file is opened is insane.
Yes, I know Apple is the one that decommissioned the API for this functionality, but Dropbox has had many months to find a workaround to this with no updates on progress.
