Missing Open Graph data when loading shared file link

harlanhaskins

Hi!

I'm working on a chat service where our users would like to send public Dropbox links. I noticed that when I load a shared Dropbox link (like this one: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9zhr8oqh8d49vgkvtn6jo/IMG_3996.HEIC?rlkey=iw62xieb2yrxtn0ujczl2lmkb&st=yq524xne&dl=0) that when I inspect the HTML it contains og:image tags, etc. But when I load this directly from our server, the page resolves to a 404 and there are no media tags.

We're not trying to scrape or download files, we just want to display file metadata inline with users' chat messages. Is there a good way for us to ensure we get good data?

We're not sure how, for example, opengraph.xyz can show this metadata, but linkpreview.net cannot.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

DB-Des

Hi @harlanhaskins,

By default, shared links point to HTML preview pages, not the file content itself. You can modify these links for other behaviors though, such as direct file access. You can find information on doing so here:
 
https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/force-download