Table of Contents       3. Catalog your data


3.17 Catalog your Dropbox



Only NeoFinder can catalog your entire Dropbox contents directly, too. No other software needed!

Here is how this works.

Use the “Dropbox Connector” command in the
Special menu of NeoFinder. This new window will appear and show you the connection status of your Dropbox:


In this case, you need to connect to the Dropbox service with NeoFinder first. Simply click the “Connect” button.

A new window will appear where you can enter your Dropbox user name and password. This window is totally controlled by Dropbox, so NeoFinder will never see any of your credentials.

Login to your Dropbox with your Dropbox email or user name, and your password.


Dropbox will ask you if you wish to allow NeoFinder access to your Dropbox.


The next step is very important: NeoFinder needs to get the security "access token" from Dropbox, so when Dropbox asks you to open your NeoFinder.app, please allow it, and make sure that NeoFinder can catalog your Dropbox data for you.


If you were successful at connecting to your Dropbox, the Connector window will show your account email.


Now you can Catalog or Update an existing catalog of the content of your Dropbox.

In this example, NeoFinder already has a catalog of that Dropbox account, so only Update is available as an option. Clicking it will cause NeoFinder to see if you have made changes to the content of your Dropbox:


But cataloging and viewing the content of your Dropbox is far from all that NeoFinder can offer here.



Download Files

You can use NeoFinder to download files from your Dropbox easily. Simply select a file, and use the “Save copy as...” command in the Item menu, and NeoFinder will happily download the selected file from the Dropbox to your local disk.


And that is not all!

You can
rename files and folders in NeoFinder, and NeoFinder will rename these items in your Dropbox as well.

Also, you can
delete files or folders from both NeoFinder and your Dropbox, in one simple operation.

Isn’t that cool?


Download entire Folders

NeoFinder can download entire folders from your Dropbox to your Mac, including all subfolders and of course all contained files! Simply drag a folder from a Dropbox catalog to a Finder window, or use the "Save copy as…" command in the Item menu. That is easy, right?



Share the URL

With NeoFinder 7.2, you can even get a URL for any file of your Dropbox, which you can send to other people for sharing!

Select the file in a Dropbox catalog in NeoFinder and use the contextual menu, the new command "Get Dropbox Download URL"



This will connect to the Dropbox server to obtain a special URL that you can use for sharing. Once the data is received, NeoFinder will display it in the Dropbox Connector window, allowing you to copy it to the clipboard, or open it directly for you.


Please note that this link is a lot longer than the one that the Finder Plugin of Dropbox, or the context menus of Dropbox generate, but so far there seems to be no way for third-party tools like NeoFinder to generate such a permanent URL for you.


System Requirements

Please note that the official Dropbox framework that NeoFinder uses requires Mac OS X 10.10.5, so this whole feature will not work in previous versions of Mac OS X.


Notes

At this time, NeoFinder cannot catalog thumbnails or additional metadata from the Dropbox. There seems to be a special API for that, and we are currently looking into that.