Can someone help me understand this Dropbox announcement? I've read it a bunch of times and I'm not sure I get it.
Important changes to the Dropbox public folder
Dropbox accounts created after October 4, 2012 won't have 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.
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
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 Pro, Plus, and Business users will no longer be able to render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality will be disabled. Until that date, Dropbox Pro, Plus, and Business users can continue to use public links to render HTML content.
I've been a free user of Droxbox for years and have used it to host the images for my precious AARs. Here's what I think the above announcement, and the linked article about shared folders and links, mean:
Starting tomorrow, the images for my AARs will stop working.
I can still use Dropbox to host my images, but I will have to set up a "shared folder," move all the images to shared folder, and change the image links in my AARs so that they point to the images in the shared folder.
To do the above without allowing people to edit my images, I'll have to set the folder's permission to view-only access. And do to that, I'll have to upgrade to Dropbox Plus.
I'm not really seeing any reference to images? I think all it's really saying is anyone using the service to host webpages won't be able to anymore, which is the first time I've heard anyone actually doing with the service. If you were uploading webpages in order to showcase your images, it could be a problem, but images themselves? I think those would be fine. You likely wouldn't be able to link to them directly, but you could post a shared link as a workaround, which would contain the images. In theory, you could possibly embed them via a forum posting, but I'm not sure if that would work with images stored in a shared link.
