How to Let Others Upload Files to your Dropbox

Lets say you have a Dropbox account and you want to provide other people – your clients, your friends or even complete strangers - the abili...

Lets say you have a Dropbox account and you want to provide other people – your clients, your friends or even complete strangers - the ability to directly upload files to your Dropbox folder.

One of the possible solutions to this problem is email based uploads. You create a separate email address and any file attachments that are sent to this email address would automatically download to your local Dropbox folder. There’s no need for anyone to even install Dropbox and all they need is an email client to upload files to your Dropbox account.

Shared Folders is another option. You create a common Dropbox folder and share it with friends using their email addresses. The folder will then appear inside their Dropbox installations and they can add files to it as if it were their own. The downside is that you are giving both read and write access to your shared folder.

Let Anyone Upload Files to your Dropbox

JotForm, a popular web app that you may have used in the past to create online forms, now offers an almost perfect interesting solution to the above problem. Test it here.

To get started, create a simple Dropbox form using the WYSIWYG editor, connect it to your Dropbox account (using OAuth) and what you get is an online form that you may embed on your website or directly link from email messages and tweets.

Since it’s a public form, anyone can see it and files that they upload using the form will land straight into your Dropbox folder. You may keep the upload form simple, as in the example above, or may chose to have additional user fields like name, email address, etc.

The Dropbox integration in JotForm is completely free and you don’t even to create an account with JotForm in order to create a web based Dropbox uploader. To prevent abuse, you may turn on the “Unique Submission” setting for your form and the service will reject multiple submission through a combination of cookies and visitor’s IP address.

You may upload one or more files of any size and any type though the maximum size of the batch should not exceed 50 MB. Here are some more Dropbox tips & tricks