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Comment by runn1ng | Hacker News Reader

A hint to everyone:

If you got the link, made by "Get link", and you don't like the innecessary preview in browser, just add "?dl=1" to the end of the link

example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1axoy96uwa80wko/matfyzak%20%281%29... - ugly preview page https://www.dropbox.com/s/1axoy96uwa80wko/matfyzak%20%281%29... - sane PDF link

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Thanks for the tip, but it comes with zero guarantee the link will work that way next week.

And with changes like the one being discussed here I'm guessing a referrer / login check will be in place at some point in the future (basically downgrading DropBox public sharing to the equivalent of Google Sites).

Edit: It's also worth noting that this parameter forces a download rather than opening things in the browser when possible.

Doesn't work as intended with images -- you get a download instead of showing the image inside the browser. A step backward compared to the old Public folder.

Well, you can go to that link page, copy the "Download" URL and remove the "?dl=1" suffix. You should have a dl.dropbox.com URL now, which will show the file in the browser, and not force the browser to download the file.

That being said: it's an undocumented feature, thus can't be taken as granted (and so might be removed at any point in time without warning), and the path is still cryptic.

Dropbox support offered up the ?dl=1 querystring as the solution to permanent, public URLs when I emailed them, but I have the same issue with the fact that the files are forced to download. If they're going to stick with Dropbox branded preview for public URLs, I'd like to at least see a similar ?view=1 querystring to keep images/pdfs/etc.. displaying directly in the browser.

The problem there is that it doesn't solve their hotlinking problem.

Delete the '?dl=1' parameter, and change the URL from 'www.dropbox.com' to 'dl.dropbox.com'.

This yields a proper direct link to the file, but the directory tree is still inaccessible.

That's perfect, thanks!

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