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How to Let Others Upload Files to your Dropbox Account
A class teacher needs her students to submit homework at the end of the
week. A company wants designers to send the mockups and design drafts
for review. A news organization is asking public to upload documents to
their website. An event organizer is requesting attendees to send any
photos or videos that they may have taken at the event.
What do you think is the easiest solution for all these use cases?
Yes, e-mail. People can send you files by email and you can then use the
Save Attachments script to automatically download these files to your computer. The big problem is that you cannot receive big files via email and second, it does take some work to organize stuff that arrives in email.
Wouldn’t
it be easier if you could create a public folder on the Internet where
anyone could go and simply upload the files instead of sending them to
you as file attachments. Students can upload assignments, designers can
upload mockups and your friends can upload photographs.
Let Anyone Upload Files to your Dropbox
This is the essence of Dropbox Requests.
The requests service would let anyone – your clients, work colleagues
or even anonymous strangers – directly upload files to a designated
folder in your Dropbox account easily and quickly.
They do not
need a Dropbox account and you’ll get an instant email notification as
soon as new files are added to your Dropbox. And you can accept files as
big as 2 GB provided you’ve enough free space in your Dropbox.
Such a feature is missing in Google Drive but you can build a form that would let anyone upload files to your Drive with the help of Google Scripts.
Your
Dropbox Request link is “unlisted” meaning anyone can access your file
upload form if they know the URL. Also, when uploading files, the
uploader would have to write their name and email address in the upload
form but these are not verified so the upload will happen even if
they enter fake information.
Dropbox shares no other details of
the file uploader with the folder owner though they should be recording
your IP address in their own database. Thus, Dropbox Request may not be
an ideal solution if you are operating a Wikileaks like website where
you would not like people to leave a digital trail.
