Dropbox icons disappear from Dolphin unless I start browsing directly from ~/Dropbox

Ask Fedora
1

I am using Fedora Linux 41 KDE Plasma. I have the Dropbox extension for Dolphin enabled. If I start browsing directly from the ~/Dropbox folder all of the Dropbox icons and context menu items show up and stay there as I continue to subfolders. However if I create a alias to one of the subfolders, or else if I click the Dolphin icon on the taskbar and this restores my last opened folder, which is a subfolder of ~/Dropbox, none of the icons show up. It’s super annoying to have to go to the root Dropbox folder and browse into subfolders just to be sure the icons will show up when I want to see if a file is up to date, or share a link to a file, or whatever. This doesn’t seem right.

2

Hello!

I would firstly recommend upgrading to the latest version, which is Fedora 42.

  1. Open the “Discover” application.
  2. Navigate to the “Updates” section.
  3. If the Fedora 42 upgrade is available, it will be listed here. Click on “Upgrade” and follow the on-screen instructions.

Check for updates until everything is upgraded and installed.

However, that might not fully fix the issue. There are 3 methods:

  1. Use bind mounts instead of symlinks for Dropbox subfolders

mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/SubfolderAlias sudo mount --bind ~/Dropbox/Some/Deep/Subfolder ~/Dropbox/SubfolderAlias

To make this persistent, add to /etc/fstab:
/home/yourusername/Dropbox/Some/Deep/Subfolder /home/yourusername/Dropbox/SubfolderAlias none bind 0 0

  1. Use a Dolphin wrapper script to always reinit metadata

#!/bin/bash target="$1" if [[ "$target" == *"/Dropbox/"* ]]; then dolphin ~/Dropbox && dolphin "$target" else dolphin "$target" fi

Call this script instead of directly launching Dolphin.

  1. Use Dropbox CLI for share/link operations:

dropbox status dropbox filestatus ~/Dropbox/Some/Path/File.txt

Or:
dropbox sharelink ~/Dropbox/Some/Path/File.txt

I hope this helps! :slight_smile: