When you get copied of Dropbox shared link, you will see the file link in the following format:
www.dropbox.com/s/HOST_ID/filename.extension
After getting a public shared link path to a image file, if you try to visit it you will get preview on Dropbox site and image hosting doesn’t work by pasting this link.
So to fix this, all you need is to change the shared link path domain name with new one. Just replace www.dropbox.com
with dl.dropboxusercontent.com
and this will serve actual file instead of getting previewed in a site.
Example of default Dropbox public shared link path:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kwyt8v55bhbj3vv/20150819-dropbox-logotype-blue.png?dl=0
Replaced with a actual file path:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kwyt8v55bhbj3vv/20150819-dropbox-logotype-blue.png
Tip: To get direct download link to a file uploaded on Dropbox you can use ?dl=1
as a query parameter in your URL. And to just bypass the preview page on Dropbox you can use use ?raw=1
.
Now an HTML markup like
<figure>
<a href="//dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kwyt8v55bhbj3vv/20150819-dropbox-logotype-blue.png">
<img src="//dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kwyt8v55bhbj3vv/20150819-dropbox-logotype-blue.png" alt="Copyright Dropbox logo type blue">
</a>
<figcaption>Dropbox, the Dropbox logo are trademarks of Dropbox Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.</figcaption>
</figure>
will output as following:
There’re many free static HTML host powered by the Dropbox API. Some of them are:
“There is a hard limit of 20GB/day for Basic (free) accounts and 200GB/day for paid accounts to all of your links together, after which they’re temporarily disabled, and those who try to access them will see an error page instead of your files,” Dropbox explains.
Lets compare, you have images hosted on Dropbox which is around 250KB. That means images all together should have less than 80K impressions in a day for you to stay within the Dropbox traffic limits. And if another site hotlink to your static images, it may use up your “free bandwidth” quota even sooner.
Note that this is for share links, not for access via the API.