I’ve been using Dropbox for years, from before I had multiple devices to sync or even fully understood how to use it efficiently. I don’t remember what got me started—collaborating with an editor? Sharing my son’s homework? Who knows, and it doesn’t matter. I ended up with it installed on two MacBooks (one at my house and one at my girlfriend’s), an iPad, and an iPhone.
At the same time, a key part of my workflow has long been custom icons to help distinguish different projects. I’m a freelance writer and might be working with 4 or 5 clients at the same time, and having each client’s work folder represented by their logo makes finding what I want to work on a lot more efficient.
Up until a few weeks ago, these two things worked together seamlessly: I could use custom icons for the projects stored in Dropbox, and while the icons wouldn’t sync with the folders, they were persistent on the machine I created them on. But then one day, I saw that all my work folders just had generic folder icons.
It took me a few days to figure out it was just folders in Dropbox that had turned generic—that it wasn’t some systemwide MacOS glitch. Once I pinpointed the problem, I went looking for solutions on the Dropbox support forum. Unsurprisingly, I found a fairly recent thread discussing my issue. But even though the thread was marked “solved,” the alleged solution didn’t work (“upgrade”), and new participants like me were still asking for answers.
What was particularly aggravating was that Dropbox started out denying that anything had changed. A support representative kept popping into the discussion to assure us that they’d be in touch via email, but everyone they contacted got some variation of the answer I did: “this is normal behavior from the Dropbox application” and “there is no process for the Mac OS to allow customized icons to remain upon syncing” (even though that had always worked before). Others were told they should get in touch with Apple to resolve the issue. The attitude seemed to be that custom icons were a special feature we were requesting, not just the restoration of a function that had always been there.
The baffling part for me was and is: doesn’t anybody at Dropbox use custom folder icons? Don’t any of the engineers or managers keep track of their projects that way? Didn’t this change bust a lot of internal workflows to the point that somebody thought “maybe this isn’t a good idea”?
Dissatisfaction grows
As of today, the support forum thread is up to 16 pages. New users are still joining as they get whatever update broke their icons, finally figure out where their icons went, or whatever brought the issue to their attention. Dropbox representatives have little more to say than “the team is aware of your comments.”
Much of the discussion at this point is about alternatives, which I’m exploring too. Sync.com looks good, OneDrive works fine for Word documents at least, some people swear by Google Drive, and iCloud Drive is another option for Apple types like me. They don’t all have the bells and whistles Dropbox has added over the years, but I don’t need most of those (and neither, apparently, do a lot of other people). I don’t want “smart content suggestions” from a syncing utility about what I should work on next. I don’t need “note taking templates” for upcoming meetings. As a freelancer, I don’t need “actionable insights into team activity.” And while Dropbox Basic is still free and has the features I do need (except for custom icon support!), it now only allows syncing between 3 devices—for the 4 I have, I’d have to pay $12/mo.
The company claims that removing the custom icons somehow keeps a “consistent structure” throughout your account, but others have pointed out that custom icons are just stored as a hidden file inside the folder they apply to. Dropbox has to take the step of deleting that file in a folder on your computer when it syncs it in order to remove the icon, which strikes many of us as unwanted and unwarranted meddling with our files. It’s weird to watch a well-established platform shoot itself in the foot like this—to make a change that makes it it far less useful for many of its customers, with no discernible benefit for any of them.
In the meantime, all I can say is “nice knowin’ ya.”