Please add an option to disable Dropbox icon overlays. It is so frustrating to remove Dropbox Shell Icon identifiers from the top of ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers list after each update! It is disrespectful to users to decide for them which overlays they need. I'm using TortoiseGit and I really need its overlays, they are useful and important for my work. Every time Dropbox updates I can no longer see status icons and have to go to Registry editor and remove newly added and USELESS Dropbox overlays.I've seen dozens of feature requests from Dropbox users for many years but Dropbox pretends everything is fine! UPD: I had patience to open a thread and communicate with Dropbox team on this issue. After almost 2 years, more than 100 upvotes they have just thrown my idea away suggesting me to edit Windows registry. I've heared your answer, that's how you treat your loyal users.So long Dropbox!

It is most important! We need it! Please fix it!

stdedos several annoyed people mean nothing to Dropbox. But dozens of their shouts in this thread can do a job.Thank you for your attention. Please consider voting up and sharing this idea.

The Dropbox leadership needs quit fending off the multitude of small user complaints. You are a subsidiary and a niche service provider, not a tech giant squatting on an operating system with bundled services. The giants are like gravity; everyone does business with them, but they want to know everything about their customers in return. You do not have the ability to compete with them in terms of the breadth of applications and depth of integration they can offer. As it stands, the only reason anyone would rationally choose Dropbox (or any independent cloud storage provider) over the cloud storage solutions built into every laptop and phone is better privacy; the unenforceable, incomprehensible legal assurances that each giant uses to paper over the ugly reality of their business are not enough for some of us. However, if Dropbox wishes to continue to be relevant, they are going to have to do more listening to the little gripes and wants, and engaging. I believe it should be possible to do this and still make a buck for the bean counters to count, but you are going to have to engage better than the giants do, or I predict you will no longer be relevant a decade from now. We don't need another take-it-or-leave it service bleeding our bank accounts.

I agree it should be for users to decide whose icons they prefer... In the meantime, I found this web page which describes a fix (if the conflict is between Dropbox and TortoiseGit). It worked fine for me but I still think Dropbox should fix this (or at least have an option whereby users can decide whether Dropbox icons are wanted or not...)

Dear Dropbox Development Team, How many times do paying customers need to hit you over the head with the problem about messing with user selected Windows folder icons? How many? Apparently whatever WE do as a community has no effect on motivating you to get this problem fixed. I have been a Dropbox customer for about five years! Yep, five years. During that time you still DO NOTHING. ONE SIMPLE REQUEST. Wake up!! As a community we should all post a request (thousands per day), and just inundate you with the same request, until you fix the problem. How about it community! I depend on tools like this to di my job everyday. I don't need any dead weight to make my job any harder than it is!!! Get cracking!!

Add option to disable icon overlays in Windows Explorer

johne53
Helpful | Level 6
4 years ago
Posted by Nigdig:
" I have convinced the colleague to drop dropbox and use OneDrive instead so the problem has gone away. "

Yes that's what I ended up doing - and guess what happened... I now get constant emails from Dropbox who can't understand why I don't use it any more!!

I've never known an organisation so pig-headed. No matter how often we complain, they utterly refuse to fix this problem. But then they get upset when we go somewhere else... it's ludicrous!
johans_dev
Explorer | Level 3
4 years ago
Long time dropbox user here. I lead the dev team, and use cloud backups as part of backup strategy (3-2-1). Been looking around for an alternative to google-drive for the corporate backups. Dropbox pricing looks good, but my experience with THIS issue here indicates that the dropbox support/dev team really does not listen to customers. So, I am rather moving our 20 TB cloud backups to another cloud storage provider that would hear client concerns and address them should they happen.
Stargx
Helpful | Level 5
4 years ago
So, this is really annoying me now. I've waited a decent amount of time to see if this will be addressed and apparently not. I'm going to end my dropbox subscription and move to something else. Any suggestions? Looks like One Drive is favoured at the moment.
luckyluke007
Helpful | Level 5
4 years ago
Since dropbox doesn't seem to give a sod about their programming customers, maybe we can use this thread to discuss dropbox alternatives best suited for programmers, no?
nofish2
Helpful | Level 5
4 years ago
It's actually not only programmers being affected negatively by this Dropbox behaviour.
I use Link Shell Extension which uses custom overlay icons for hard links etc. which also get wiped out by Dropbox.

So yeah, what's a good alterantive?
klepp0906
Collaborator | Level 10
4 years ago
chiming in to +1

getting sick of micro managing my overlays and deleting dropbox's leapfrogging hierarchy every time it updates. It entirely keeps me from opting in to the beta channel.

I have a favorite that opens my registry browser to exactly this key so i can manage these because of dropbox specifically.

Very close to locking the registry key permissions but I dont want to circle back to a problem down the road after I forget I did it or something.

A simple option to not alter those overlays or not write them if already present or... something.

otherwise im going to look into other services myself. between this and the lost functionality of symlinks within dropbox... losing a lot of my good faith.
johne53
Helpful | Level 6
4 years ago
Yes, that's it exactly! No-one's asking them to remove the overlay icons - just to add an option so users can either enable them or disable them. It's hardly rocket science.

And yet they've totally refused to implement this request, despite it now having 70+ votes!!

Yet at the same time, they can't understand why users are abandoning Dropbox and looking elsewhere... very strange 😒
2goatsandaboxofbeer
Explorer | Level 4
4 years ago
I've briefly looked into Windows Powershell, and it seems to have all the tools to edit Registry items. Perhaps someone competent in Powershell could publish a script which removes Dropbox overlays from the Registry. That way, when your Tortoise overlays disappear, you can just press an icon to automatically delete Dropbox entries. Not ideal, but straight forward enough I would have thought.

Here's your starter pack:

https://www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/2015/03/22/managing-overlay-icons-for-dropbox-and-tortoisesvn-and...

https://blog.netwrix.com/2018/09/11/how-to-get-edit-create-and-delete-registry-keys-with-powershell/
Stargx
Helpful | Level 5
4 years ago
I've finally found a solution to this. Here's how it goes for SVN users:

Go to TortoiseSVN->Settings->Icon Overlays->Overlay Handlers and click on 'Start registry editor'

Delete all the dropbox crap if present.

(Might be a good idea to save a copy of your registry before proceeding)

Right click on 'ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers' and 'Export' to save a back up.

Then right click on 'ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers' -> permissions -> advanced.

At the top left, click on the 'change' link near where is says owner.

Copy this into the box 'NT Service\TrustedInstaller'
Press OK and you're all set. This should stop any program from altering the overlay icon settings.

Here where I got this info from: https://superuser.com/questions/1271755/prevent-a-change-to-one-or-more-windows-10-registry-keys

I did this last week and so far so good, DropBox hasn't been able to mess with my icons. And it's so nice to have them back for SVN.

I'm still annoyed I have to do this. DropBox users should not have to mess with registry settings to stop this from happening.
- digisolve
  Explorer | Level 3
  2 years ago
  This doesn't work for me. 'NT Service\TrustedInstaller' is not recognised
luckyluke007
Helpful | Level 5
4 years ago
Hi Stargx,

what I experienced with your solution is that on the next update of the dropbox software, you will loose your right click context menu in explorer. There seems to be a link between both these things (I was informed on this by Dropbox support staff after complaining about the context menu dissappearing). So keep an eye open on that. If you don't need the right click context menu to copy a dropbox link, then you're fine.
I certainly need this capability and the connection between both makes it even more annoying because you have to choose between the overlay icons or the context menu....