Dropbox is pretty handy service when it comes to cloud storage, sharing & collaborating. Using Dropbox makes it easy to share files like mp3, PDF, images, etc.., among the users and the public. But the catch is that the most modern browsers can easily handle those files, So they start displaying them rather then downloading.
The other thing is that because the Dropbox can handle files like docs and PDF’s, it makes the user to view the document in the browser instead of downloading it. So, if you want to force download a file from Dropbox, there are a couple of changes you should make to ensure that you force download Dropbox files instead of viewing.
We’ve already discussed how to enable two-step authentication in Dropbox, How to recover deleted files in Dropbox and Cool things that Dropbox can do that you probably don’t know. So be sure to check them out.
Force Download Dropbox Files
To force download Dropbox files you need to make a simple change to the URL itself. As you can see the below URL is a link to PDF document with Universal browser shortcuts… As soon as you click on the the link, Dropbox will automatically render the document so that you can view the PDF directly in the browser.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19534436/Stugon/cdn/Stugon-universal-browser-shortcuts.pdf
But to make it force download, all you have to do is to add ?dl=1 at the end of the URL. After adding, the URL will look something like the below one.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19534436/Stugon/cdn/Stugon-universal-browser-shortcuts.pdf?dl=1
If you use the above link you can see that instead of rendering the file inside the browser, it will automatically start downloading. That’s all there is to do and Its that simple.