Joe Workman's Blog

Dropbox Public URL Service

Like many of you, I use Dropbox. It’s a very vital component of my workflow. Sadly, the nice contextual menus that it places inside Finder, don’t always work. I finally got fed up with this and decided to take the time to develop a service in Automator the copies the Dropbox Public URL for any file contained within my Public folder in Finder.

You can download the Dropbox Public URL Service here. Follow the instructions to get this working on your machine…

1. Open the Dropbox Public URL.workflow file that you downloaded.
2. A dialog box should appear. Click on the “Open with Automator” button.
3. The file should look like the above image.
4. Edit the $public_path variable to contain the full path to your Dropbox public folder on your machine.
5. Edit the $public_url variable to contain the url for your Dropbox public folder. The only thing that should change is the id at the end of the url.
6. Save the file and quit Automator.
7. Reopen the file. Except this time you will click on the “Install” button.

That should pretty much do it for you. You will now have a Dropbox Public URL in the Services contextual menu when you right click on a file in Finder. I hope you find this useful!