Thumbnail not showing up, only generic icon when I go to 'camera uploads' to try to attach image

I have now gone through a few posts about this going back well over a year and it would appear that Dropbox have no interst in resolving this!

I am a photographer, so not having thumbnail images or having them disappear is not simply an irritant. It makes the program I am paying for useless. From what I have noticed one way the thumbnails seems to 'vanish' if you drag the file onto say an HTML5 uploader for websites. Or indeed into Photoshop. Or use a Photoshop action to pull that image in. This never used to happen. It seems to be since this 'cloud' sync nonsense was slipped in as the default without any fanfare.

If this is not going to get resolved I will simply have to move everything over to another system and cancel dropbox

DiggerDawson

Same problem.

Screenshot 2021-02-28 182401.jpg

If I drag the file onto my desktop, I can see the thumbnail. But I need to see all the thumbnails to edit my photos. The files are showing Smart Sync Local. If I change this to Online Only, and then go back and change it to Local, the thumbnail appears. I can restore the thumbnails by selecting ALL and then going through this process, but it's a bit annoying and a waste of time.

Is there a better solution?

So that we can have a look into this in more detail, we'd need to continue through our Support channel alongside some device specific info.

If you haven't already reached out to the team, would you mind if I reach out directly to the email linked with your profiles here @DiggerDawson and @Immortaleye?

More than happy for you to contact me. The alternative is to consider moving to another platform

mm-nyc

apparently its working now, i dont know how it resolved itself.m

Thanks for your updates!

@Immortaleye, I've just sent you a brief message, so please check your inbox when you have the time.

I'm glad to hear that @mm-nyc! If you have any other trouble with this, don't hesitate to give me a nudge here.

Rossella Brambilla

I also have this problem. I sell jewellery and need to see the thumbnails to select the right file. I have a Dropbox plus subscription but this makes it fairly useless.

Thanks for joining us here @Rossella Brambilla!

To have a better look into this with us, I've just sent you a brief email to the address linked with your profile here.

Please check your inbox when you have the chance, and get back to me there if you'd like to.

In the meantime, a workaround I can suggest is to make any local files that are missing the thumbnail to "online only", and then make then available locally through the right click menu instead of double clicking them.

I'm having this same issue of thumbnails not showing up. I recently installed Dropbox on a new computer and am having this issue. Please message me directly if you can help as you did others, moderators!

Hey @ramblingsu!

Can you just confirm for me, does this only occur when you make a file available locally on your computer by double clicking the file to open it?

If you make one of these files online only through the right click menu, and afterwards make it local through the same right click menu, do you see the thumbnail appear then?

It happens whether I change to to Local or Online Only.

I see, thanks for confirming @ramblingsu.

Which version of the app do you have installed at the moment?

Also, what OS version is your device running?

119.4.1772

Windows 10

Thanks for that info @ramblingsu!

Does the current sync status show it's "up to date", or "syncing"?

Also, could you just send along a screenshot of the icons that you're seeing for your files at the moment?

Up to date. Screenshot 2021-03-31 082014.png

Awesome, thanks for that @ramblingsu!

I've just sent you an email, so please check your inbox when you have the time and we can go from there. Cheers!

I'm also having this same issue.

Would it not be helpful to all DropBox users to simply post the solution here, instead of messaging individual users privately????

What would be helpful is for them to finally resolve it. This has been going on for a while now and I am not sure if I will hold off much longer before choosing an alternative.

Currently the only offering has been to suggest switching the folder from local to online then back again. Which in may case can mean doing this several times a week, and that is before I fire back up after lockdown and start shooting several times a day.

Not sure why Dropbox support didn't just post this publicly rather than only email me, but here's a solution they sent that worked for me:

Open File Explorer > View tab > Options > View tab > Uncheck Always show icons, never thumbnails (If this is already unchecked, check it and OK..Then go back again and uncheck it and OK

Thanks ramblinsu.

Yeah. Try doing that several times a day and see if you still think of it as a 'solution' I along with others have sent over screenshots and other information on this and so far Zilch after the intial exchanges.

As a photographer when editng I am constantly draging or importing things like textures into my work and dropbox is a way of ensuring access to those from different devices and locations. Once the thumbnail vanishes I have no idea what that texture looks like, As I may import a number of textures into an image to work out what is best for that creation I quickly end up with a folder that is effectively useless to me.

Will have to start looking at Amazon or Adobe cloud options instead as this is now ludicrous. A week and our studio opens back up from lockdown. Once that happens I cannot be messing around like this.

I feel your pain as a working photographer. However, so far this has worked for me. I also have a Box account and Amazon Photos. I may give Box a test run. For me it depends on the integrations with other apps. DropBox provides a lot of integrations that I wouldn't want to work without.

patriotfence

I've had this same issue all week and tried every suggestion I could find. What worked for me was using the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows 10 (Right click on your hard drive and select Properties in the menu). I deleted the thumbnail cache, rebooted my pc and after Dropbox started again the thumbnails started re-appearing.

gotogordon

Same issue here on a clean install of Win 10. I did not have this issue before the clean install. I'm not using smart sync, all files are local. It only happens with folders within dropbox. If I move the folder to downloads or some other location outside of dropbox the thumbnails show.

I have deleted thumbs via disk cleanup and command prompt. I checked and unchecked the "show icon" button. Nothing worked.

On small folder switching to online then back works but I do not want to do that for my main pictures folder as it's 125+ gb. This is obviously a bug!

colourmepurple

I have the same problem. Double clicking the file to open it does not resolve the issue, the files are synced locally. For me its happening in the folder Dropbx > Screenshots. Its not happening to every file in that folder, only some of them, but a large percentage Screenshot 2021-05-08 10.29.29.png

daxaeterna

I am using the file explorer on my Win10 desktop and am only seeing the icons. I don't want to sync every single file locally with smart sync. I want to be able to see the thumbnail so that I can select the correct file to sync locally. How can I do this? What is the way to fix this? I wish you had posted the answer publicly instead of having to email people individually. Please assist.

There is apparently no permanent solution to this problem and Dropbox seems unwilling to address the issue.

madmick

I am pretty well an ignoramus with computers but I may have stumbled and fumbled my way to a solution to this problem.

I found that several of my folders had random images showing only the place marker with a grey X and no thumbnail. I back up all my photos onto an external hard drive so when I found a file which was badly corrupted this way I simply deleted it then replaced it from the external hard drive and right clicked to set all the files to "local".

Another hack for individual images was to right click them, make them "Online Only" then right click again and make them "Local".