DropBox API Rate Limiting

Suraj S.3

Hi All

I am Planning to host a web application which will display images in user's dropbox folder created by our app.

Was highly impressed with getThumnail() and getStartThumnail methods in JAVA SDK to get Image Thumbnail but observed that it can only give us thumbnail of a single image at a time , with 1000 of images in users dropbox i will have to make 1000 of getThumbnail() API calls, which is my major concern since there is a limit on number of api call one can make and i dont want my webapp to exceed that limit and with large number of users the api call will also increase.

What is the best solution to solve this problem and it will be very helpful if i can know API rate limiting metrics?

Is it per app or per user? and

Number of calls is per month or per year or per day?

Eagerly waiting for the response.

Thanks.

Greg-DB

You're correct that unfortunately the thumbnails API call can currently only return a single thumbnail at a time. I'll be sure to pass this along as a request for a batch version though.

For reference, the Dropbox API does have a rate limiting system, though we don't currently have any specific numbers documented. You can find some information here though:

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/bestpractices

It is per-user however, so you don't have to worry about a single user causing trouble for your entire app.

Also note that not all 503s indicate rate limiting, but in any case that you get a 429 or a 503 you should just retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response.