Dropbox Bug

I can’t be the only one who has clients who make this mistake.

When you send files to someone by sending them a link to Dropbox, and they click on it, it looks something like this. Without the red arrows, of course. (You can click on the image to get a larger view.)

The problem arises in downloading.

People are so used to being able to right-click on an image and save it, and that’s where the problem starts. They should click the Download link in the upper right, but if they don’t and do the right-click….

When you do this in Dropbox, it saves their stupid little thumbnail, not the real image.

Here’s the real image. It’s 2400×1800 and 3.2MB in size.

And here’s the thumbnail that gets downloaded if you right click and choose Save Image As…. It’s 178px x 178px and 11Kb in size.

See the difference? I sure as shit hope you can.

This is a big problem as clients are then downloading the wrong image. And sometimes they don’t notice and upload them to MLS.

Now, some might say this is user error and they’re right to some extent.

However, Dropbox also does this if the user right-clicks on a document — e.g. a Word file or a PDF file — they download a thumbnail and not the document. That’s dumber than downloading a thumbnail graphic of a larger graphic — who the hell wants a thumbnail of a text document? Click here to see.

Additionally, Google Drive doesn’t have this problem — if you right click and choose Save As you get the real file, not the thumbnail. So, you see, it is possible to save the user from making a mistake.

Please, Dropbox, fix this.

Update: Dropbox says change the “?dl=0” to “?dl=1” at the end of the URL I send my clients, which means they will have to download and won’t get the option of viewing the images online first. I know that, Dropbox, but that’s dumb. Why don’t you just fix the problem? Why would someone want to right-click on a Word document and save a png thumbnail of it?