How to share Public Dropbox Folders, allowing Downloads from your Dropbox Account - Sharing is Caring up in the Clouds

Dropbox is an incredibly powerful Cloud Drive that allows you to send large files across the Internet, especially if you have a Yahoo Email as described in my blog article entitled “Dropbox partners with Yahoo! Mail for Gigabyte File Sharing as CEO Marissa Mayer Google’s Yahoo”.

Dropbox is even used on smartphones, with a version of the handy Cloud Drive service now permanently embedded in BBM 2.0 for Blackberry users as described in my blog article entitled “BBM 2.0 now with Voice and Dropbox Integration – WhatsApp beaten for sure as Free File Sharing and Voice Calling result in BBM Transcendence on Android and iOS”.

If you have an Apple iPhone and you use Loom as you main means of storing pictures in the Cloud, then you’d already have known too that Dropbox’s Carousel feature has now replaced that service as described in my Geezam blog article entitled “Dropbox acquires iOS App Loom as it steamrolls towards the launch of its IPO”.

Cloud Drives are a very handy way of sharing files online, especially Video without the need to setup a YouTube account as explained in my blog article entitled “How to use Dropbox, Google Drive and Sound File Sharing Websites to Share and Promote your Content online - Sharing is Caring”. After all, not every time you go on the Internet at a Cyber Care, especially in May Pan, Clarendon, can you get the chance to use your Thumb Drive.

So how do you use Dropbox to share an Online Folder? Well, this how-to came in handy the other day and based on my experience, I’ve decided to share my experience in this handy DIY (Do It Yourself).

Dropbox as an Online Download Folder – How to allow anyone to download from your Dropbox Account

In this step-by-step, I’ll focus exclusively on just sharing a Folder, as it’s not as straightforward as it may seem.

If you’ve read my blog article entitled “How to use Dropbox, Google Drive and Sound File Sharing Websites to Share and Promote your Content online - Sharing is Caring”, you’d already know how to upload Video content to Dropbox or Google Drive and share it. Make sure to do that using your Dropbox Folder on your Desktop, but makes sure this time to upload to the Folder labeled Public as it is part of the Procedure.

Please note that you can’t share a Dropbox folder by using a right-click as demonstrated my blog article above; that’s for individual files. To share folders, you’ll first have to login to your Web-based Dropbox Account as shown below.

Once you’re logged in, select the Public folder to which you should have already placed the Folder with the items you wish to share as show below.

Now in my example, I’ve chosen to share the folder SD Card Recovery as highlighted below.  This folder contains 7 GB of Data, which is excellent for this test, as it was Recovered Data from an SD Card.

Now for the fun part! Select the Share Link symbol that looks a lot like a Chain Link at the upper Right hand corner of your Dropbox Account.

The following dialogue will appear. Now this dialog is completely irrelevant, as this is really for sharing Data i.e. a download link or a Link to a picture within your Dropbox via Email or Social Media. To do this you’d click on the Get Link Button and then enter the email in the Text box labeled Add Names or Emails.

Alternately, you can close this dialogue box and choose to copy and paste the link yourself for your folder. This you can do by right clicking on your Folder of choice, in this case SD Card Recovery. An option to Copy Link Address will appear in the pop-out Dialog box, which you can use to copy the publicly shareable URL (Universal Resource Locator) for the folder you wish to share.

Once you’ve clicked Copy Link Address, you can then choose to past that Link Address by clicking Ctrl + V or right clicking over a Text File and pasting the URL onto the Text File as shown below.

You can then save the Text file document on your Thumb drive or elsewhere and label it with a name to remind you what folder the link represents. Then you can share it via whatever means you desire, be it on Social Media or via email.

You can even use a URL Shortening service such as Adf.ly or Bit.ly as described in my blog article entitled “How to become an e-book Publishing House via e-book Piracy - Tablets in Schools sets the Stage for Rampant e-book Piracy” and shorten it for easier sharing via Mobile phone. At this point you can log out and test the shareable folder URL to see if it works!

A quick Note: With case of Google Drive, sharing folder is much easier as described in my blog article entitled “How to use Dropbox, Google Drive and Sound File Sharing Websites to Share and Promote your Content online - Sharing is Caring”. All you merely have to do is right click on the Folder you want to share within the Google Share Drive and the following dialog box will appear.

Then select what options you want for Sharing, be it:

1.      Public on the Web (anyone searching can access the content without having a Google Drive Account)

2.      Anyone with the Link (anyone who has received the link can access the content without having a Google Drive Account)

3.      Private (only persons the link is sent to can access the content after having signed in to Google Drive Account and must be a friend)

This is as illustrated below.

For the resulting URL, you’ll definitely have to use as URL shortening service, preferably Bit.ly.

For this reason, I prefer Dropbox. Dropbox is an especially great way to share confidential information from your workplace without other knowing about.

So have fun sharing whole folders with Dropbox. Remember sharing is caring so share this article with as many people as possible.

Here’s the links:

Dropbox

Google Drive