The Public folder

Important changes to the Dropbox public folder

As of September 1, 2017 public links have been disabled for all users. See below for more information.

Dropbox Basic (free) users

As of March 15, 2017 the Public folder in your Dropbox account has been converted into a standard folder. By default this folder is private to your account. This transition will occur automatically.

Here's what you need to know:

  • All of the files in your Public folder will remain safe, but public links to those files will stop working
  • If someone visits a link to a file in your Public folder, they'll see an error page
  • To see a list of your public links, visit the Public folder—any file in this folder will have previously had a public link associated with it
  • Dropbox can't convert existing public links into Dropbox shared links
  • If you'd like to re-share any of the files in your Public folder, please use a shared folder or shared link

Using the public folder to render HTML content

As of October 3, 2016 Dropbox Basic (free) users can no longer use public links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you're a Basic user, and you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox account, it will no longer render in the browser. The HTML content itself remains safe in Dropbox, and you can share it using any of our other sharing methods.

Effective September 1, 2017, Dropbox Plus and Business users can no longer render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality have been disabled.

Accounts created after October 4, 2012

Dropbox accounts created after October 4, 2012 would not have had a Public folder. If you'd like to quickly share files you can use a shared link. Shared links work even if the person you're sharing with doesn't have a Dropbox account.

Not using Dropbox yet? See how Dropbox makes managing file permissions easy.

How helpful was this article?

We’re sorry to hear that.
Let us know how we can improve:

Thanks for your feedback!
Let us know how this article helped:

Thanks for your feedback!