Embedding images without sharing for just the using signed in (trying to build an app)

Sjoerd

Hi,

I'm trying to build an app to sort images. Mostly focused on holiday images. Since I have these spread through my Dropbox(phone camera uploads, dslr saved to a seperate Dropbox folder, shares from others who took pictures).

The idea is to make a webapp where I can go trough these images stored on Dropbox and label them, categorise them, etc.

Now most of that is no problem. But! I want to show the user (after giving permissions to the app) his own images in the browser. And I can't get it to work.

- Sharing isn't what I want, since then it will be "public". And I can't share with just myself.
- Temporary url creation can't create a link that works for embedding in html
- Downloading a file actually downloads it to the server and then I have to transfer it to the client of the user and embed it via javascript. This is messy and quite inefficient. I'm also worried about performance, since I want to go trough the images quickly(2500 vacation pictures is a lot of work).

Is there a way to embed images in html without sharing publicly?

I'm using the Python api and Flask.

Thanks in advance!

Greg-DB

Using the temporary links returned by /2/files/get_temporary_link would be the closest thing to what you're looking for. I believe that should technically work for embedding images, e.g., using the link the 'src' for an <img> tag. In what way did that not work?

An alternative would be to make the API calls in JavaScript directly from the browser, e.g., using the API v2 JavaScript SDK, to avoid sending it through your server. That would look something like this:

dbx.filesDownload({path: '/test.jpg'})
  .then(function(response) {
    var blobUrl = URL.createObjectURL(response.fileBlob);
    var img = document.createElement('img');
    img.setAttribute('src', blobUrl);
    document.getElementById('results').appendChild(img);
  })
  .catch(function(error) {
    console.error(error);
  });

I'll also send this along as a feature request for a better way to do this via the server though.